The Gene Introgression Approach and the Potential Cost of Genes that Confer Strong Phosphine Resistance in Red Flour Beetle (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae)
- 14 March 2020
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in Journal of Economic Entomology
- Vol. 113 (3), 1547-1554
- https://doi.org/10.1093/jee/toaa033
Abstract
Resistance in pest insects to the grain fumigant phosphine (PH3) poses a threat to trade and food security. The possible pleiotropic effects of PH3 resistance on development and reproduction were investigated in the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum (Herbst), by introgressing two genes known to be major contributors to strong resistance (tc_rph1 and tc_rph2) into a susceptible background. The tc_rph2 allele was the G135S variant, whereas the identity of tc_rph1 allele was unknown but could have been one of the three known variants (L119W, V123F, or S349G). The introgressed resistant strain was 288× more resistant than the susceptible strain, based on mortality after a 20 h fumigation with PH3. Molecular screening confirmed that the introgressed strain was homozygous for the resistance genes, but was otherwise indistinguishable from the susceptible strain based on screening with 12 neutral DNA markers. We found no differences of consequence in developmental time between the susceptible and introgressed resistant strains. Similarly, the number of F1 adults produced by these strains was more or less equal, as was the weight of individual F1 adults. The conclusions remained the same regardless of whether the experiments were conducted on a flour-based medium or wheat. Thus, we found no evidence that being fully strongly PH3 resistant (i.e., homozygous for tc_rph1 and tc_rph2) has major consequences in terms of development or reproduction in T. castaneum.Keywords
Funding Information
- Cooperative Research Centre for National Plant Biosecurity (CRC50149)
- Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centres
- Australian Government’s Australia-India Strategic Research Fund (GCF010006)
- Department of Industry and Science
This publication has 44 references indexed in Scilit:
- Rapid genome wide mapping of phosphine resistance loci by a simple regional averaging analysis in the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneumBMC Genomics, 2013
- A Core Metabolic Enzyme Mediates Resistance to Phosphine GasScience, 2012
- Strong resistance to phosphine in the rusty grain beetle, Cryptolestes ferrugineus (Stephens) (Coleoptera: Laemophloeidae): its characterisation, a rapid assay for diagnosis and its distribution in AustraliaPest Management Science, 2012
- Geneious Basic: An integrated and extendable desktop software platform for the organization and analysis of sequence dataBioinformatics, 2012
- Phosphine Resistance in the Rust Red Flour Beetle, Tribolium castaneum (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae): Inheritance, Gene Interactions and Fitness CostsPLOS ONE, 2012
- Effects of host plant and genetic background on the fitness costs of resistance to Bacillus thuringiensisHeredity, 2010
- The effects of the genetic background on herbicide resistance fitness cost and its associated dominance in Arabidopsis thalianaHeredity, 2008
- genepop’007: a complete re‐implementation of the genepop software for Windows and LinuxMolecular Ecology Resources, 2008
- genalex 6: genetic analysis in Excel. Population genetic software for teaching and researchMolecular Ecology Notes, 2005
- An economic method for the fluorescent labeling of PCR fragmentsNature Biotechnology, 2000