Bombyx mori nucleopolyhedrovirus: molecular biology and biotechnological applications for large-scale synthesis of recombinant proteins

Abstract

Bombyx mori nucleopolyhedrosis virus (BmNPV), a natural pathogen of great economic significance in sericulture, has been exploited to generate recombinant baculoviruses harbouring genes of choice and achieve high level expression of cloned foreign genes. The BmNPV-based expression system offers the advantage of using the larval host rather than the insectderived cell lines for economic large-scale synthesis of biomolecules. Since commercial rearing of silkworms is routinely practised, a part of the silkworm stocks can be diverted to produce biomolecules other than silk and the more sophisticated tissue culture methodologies can be dispensed with on an industrial scale. Nonetheless, the BmNPV-based expression considerably lags behind the AcMNPV system in vogue today, in terms of the choice of expression-optimized cloning vectors and easy recombinant generation kits that are commercially available. This review provides a brief outline of the current state of knowledge on the basic biology and genomics of BmNPV and how the virus has been made use of to produce biomolecules through its larval host, the mulberry silkworm. Since hyper-transcription from the viral very late gene promoters forms the basis of high level expression through recombinant baculoviruses, some aspects of the viral gene transcription and the role of late gene expression factors have also been included in the review.