"July 1985." Sponsored by USEPA, HERL, DBD, PTB "Project officer: Clinton Kawanishi." Includes bibliographical references. "EPA/600/1-85/018." "PB85-242527".

"Due to the environmental and ecological effects of toxic chemical pesticides, the usage of insect viruses have been considered as one of the alternatives for the control of agriculture insect pests. In fact in the past 3 decades, several baculoviruses have been used as viral pesticides for pest control. It has not been demonstrated to be hazardous to non-target organisms using the classical infectivity and morphological alteration as measuring factors. In this research project, we have further used molecular biological approaches to characterize the molecular structure of one of the insect viruses to investigate and elucidate the possible pathogenicity and oncogenicity of pesticidal viruses to human and other mammals at in vitro level. Our study suggests that the pesticidal virus Spodoptera Frugiperda (SF) can not productively infect human fibroblast or HEP-2 cell lines and can not induce morphological transformation of human fibroblast. Besides this study on the biopathology of a pesticidal virus, Spodoptera frugiperda nuclear polyhedrosis virus (SfNPV), we have also extensively studied the molecular structure of the genome of this virus justified on the need in developing non-hazardous universal pesticidal viruses. The complete set of virus DNA fragments have been cloned in pBR322 plasmid. This set of the recombinant plasmid is now available for further gene function study."--Abstract.