Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology, North Carolina State University, Campus Box 7613, Raleigh, NC 27695-7613, USA.
Otis Laboratory, USDA APHIS PPQ S&T, 1398 West Truck Road, Buzzards Bay, MA 02542, USA.
J Econ Entomol. 2021 Jun 11;114(3):1091-1103. doi: 10.1093/jee/toab039.
Diet optimization is an important process to increase the efficiency of rearing insects and can be used to develop high-quality insects with specific fitness and life-history traits. Galleria mellonella (L.), the greater wax moth, is widely used in research, microbiology assays, as pet food, and host for biological control agents. Although artificial diets for G. mellonella have been researched and optimized for decades, preliminary tests indicated that the predominantly utilized G. mellonella diet could be improved to yield larger larvae with a short development time. We used a design of experiments (DOE) approach that incorporated multiple full factorial designs and a final mixture design to test the qualitative and quantitative effects of ingredients and their interactions on larval mass and survival. Analysis of 17 ingredient variations in 35 diet formulations yielded an optimized diet that supported high survival and 2.4-fold greater larval body mass than the standard rearing diet. This study demonstrates the importance and efficiency of statistical DOE in guiding the optimization of insect diets to improve traits that represent the quality and fitness of the reared insects.
饮食优化是提高昆虫饲养效率的重要过程，可用于开发具有特定适应性和生活史特征的高质量昆虫。黄粉甲（Galericella mellonella）（鳞翅目：麦蛾科），又名褐粉甲，广泛应用于研究、微生物检测、宠物食品以及生物防治剂的宿主。尽管已经研究和优化了人工饲养黄粉甲的饲料，但初步测试表明，目前主要使用的黄粉甲饲料可以进一步改进，以获得生长更快、体型更大的幼虫。我们使用实验设计（DOE）方法，结合多个全因子设计和最终的混合设计，测试了成分及其相互作用对幼虫质量和存活率的定性和定量影响。在 35 种饲料配方中对 17 种成分的变化进行分析，得到了一种优化的饲料配方，其支持高存活率，并使幼虫体重增加了 2.4 倍，优于标准饲养饲料。本研究证明了统计 DOE 在指导昆虫饲料优化方面的重要性和效率，这有助于改善代表所饲养昆虫质量和适应性的特性。
