Laboratory for Molecular Virology, Great Lakes Forestry Centre, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario P6A 2E5, Canada.
Viruses. 2011 Nov;3(11):2214-22. doi: 10.3390/v3112214. Epub 2011 Nov 10.
Hymenoptera is a very large and ancient insect order encompassing bees, wasps, ants and sawflies. Fossil records indicate that they existed over 200 million years ago and about 100 million years before the appearance of Lepidoptera. Sawflies have been major pests in many parts of the world and some have caused serious forest defoliation in North America. All baculoviruses isolated from sawflies are of the single nucleocapsids phenotype and appear to replicate in midgut cells only. This group of viruses has been shown to be excellent pest control agents and three have been registered in Canada and Britain for this purpose. Sawfly baculoviruses contain the smallest genome of all baculoviruses sequenced so far. Gene orders among sequenced sawfly baculoviruses are co-linear but this is not shared with the genomes of lepidopteran baculoviruses. One distinguishing feature among all sequenced sawfly viruses is the lack of a gene encoding a membrane fusion protein, which brought into question the role of the budded virus phenotype in Gammabaculovirus biology.
膜翅目是一个非常大且古老的昆虫目，包括蜜蜂、黄蜂、蚂蚁和叶蜂。化石记录表明，它们存在于 2 亿多年前，比鳞翅目出现早约 1 亿年。叶蜂在世界许多地方都是主要害虫，有些叶蜂在北美的森林中造成了严重的落叶。从叶蜂中分离到的所有杆状病毒都是单核衣壳表型，似乎只在中肠细胞中复制。这组病毒已被证明是极好的害虫控制剂，其中 3 种已在加拿大和英国注册用于此目的。叶蜂杆状病毒包含迄今为止测序的所有杆状病毒中最小的基因组。已测序的叶蜂杆状病毒之间的基因排列是共线性的，但与鳞翅目杆状病毒的基因组不同。所有已测序的叶蜂病毒的一个显著特征是缺乏编码膜融合蛋白的基因，这使得芽生病毒表型在γ杆状病毒生物学中的作用受到质疑。
