Chemosensory Proteins Protect from Imidacloprid by Sequestering the Insecticide and Facilitating Metabolic Detoxification.

The involvement of chemosensory proteins (CSPs) in binding to insecticides has been implicated. However, our understanding of CSP-mediated insecticide resistance remains limited. Herein, 15 CSP genes were identified and characterized from . Expression analysis identified six CSPs with overexpression in the imidacloprid-resistant strain, whose involvement in imidacloprid resistance was validated by RNA interference. Among them, four CSPs were successfully expressed using a prokaryotic expression system, and their binding affinities to imidacloprid were confirmed through fluorescence competitive binding assays. Knockdown of them impaired the capacity of to metabolize imidacloprid and inhibited the activity of metabolic detoxification pathways, while their overexpression in enhanced bacterial metabolic efficiency toward imidacloprid. Furthermore, the transcriptional regulation of and was found to be mediated by AhR/ARNT and CncC/MafK. These findings suggest that the overexpression of CSPs in promotes imidacloprid resistance by sequestering the insecticide and enhancing metabolic detoxification.