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Quantification of Soil-to-Plant Transport of Recombinant Nucleopolyhedrovirus: Effects of Soil Type and Moisture, Air Currents, and Precipitation

ABSTRACT Significantly more occlusion bodies (OB) of DuPont viral construct HzSNPV-LqhIT2, expressing a scorpion toxin, were transported by artificial rainfall to cotton plants from sandy soil (70:15:15 sand-silt-clay) than from silt (15:70:15) and significantly more from silt than from clay (15:15:70). The amounts transported by 5 versus 50 mm of precipitation were the same, and transport was zero when there was no precipitation. In treatments that included precipitation, the mean number of viable OB transported to entire, 25- to 35-cm-tall cotton plants ranged from 56 (clay soil, 5 mm of rain) to 226 (sandy soil, 50 mm of rain) OB/plant. In a second experiment, viral transport increased with increasing wind velocity (0, 16, and 31 km/h) and was greater in dry (−1.0 bar of matric potential) than in moist (−0.5 bar) soil. Wind transport was greater for virus in a clay soil than in silt or sand. Only 3.3 × 10−7 (clay soil, 5 mm rain) to 1.3 × 10−6 (sandy soil, 50 mm rain) of the OB in surrounding soil in experiment 1 or 1.1 × 10−7(−0.5 bar sandy soil, 16-km/h wind) to 1.3 × 10−6(−1.0 bar clay soil, 31-km/h wind) in experiment 2 were transported by rainfall or wind to cotton plants. This reduces the risk of environmental release of a recombinant nucleopolyhedrovirus (NPV), because only a very small proportion of recombinant virus in the soil reservoir is transported to vegetation, where it can be ingested by and replicate in new host insects.