The Sterile Insect Technique is a species-specific and environmentally friendly method of pest control involving mass release of sterilized insects that reduce the wild population through infertile matings. Insects carrying a female-specific autocidal genetic system offer an attractive alternative to conventional sterilization methods while also eliminating females from the release population. We exploited sex-specific alternative splicing in insects to engineer female-specific autocidal genetic systems in the Mediterranean fruit fly, Ceratitis capitata. These rely on the insertion of cassette exons from the C. capitata transformer gene into a heterologous tetracycline-repressible transactivator such that the transactivator transcript is disrupted in male splice variants but not in the female-specific one. As the key components of these systems function across a broad phylogenetic range, this strategy addresses the paucity of sex-specific expression systems (e.g., early-acting, female-specific promoters) in insects other than Drosophila melanogaster. The approach may have wide applicability for regulating gene expression in other organisms, particularly for combinatorial control with appropriate promoters.

The Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) used to control insect pests relies on the release of large numbers of radiation-sterilized insects. Irradiation can have a negative impact on the subsequent performance of the released insects and therefore on the cost and effectiveness of a control program. This and other problems associated with current SIT programs could be overcome by the use of recombinant DNA methods and molecular genetics. Here we describe the construction of strains of the Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly) harboring a tetracycline-repressible transactivator (tTA) that causes lethality in early developmental stages of the heterozygous progeny but has little effect on the survival of the parental transgenic tTA insects. We show that these properties should prove advantageous for the implementation of insect pest control programs.

Methods involving the release of transgenic insects in the field hold great promise for controlling vector-borne diseases and agricultural pests. Insect transformation depends on nonautonomous transposable elements as gene vectors. The resulting insertions are stable in the absence of suitable transposase, however, such absence cannot always be guaranteed. We describe a method for post-integration elimination of all transposon sequences in the pest insect Medfly, Ceratitis capitata. The resulting insertions lack transposon sequences and are therefore impervious to transposase activity.

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Germ-line transformation of a major agricultural pest, the Mexican fruit fly (Anastrepha ludens Loew, Mexfly), was achieved using composite piggyBac transposable elements marked with green, yellow and red fluorescent proteins (CopGreen, PhiYFP and J-Red). We also investigated the possibility of generating transposon-free insertions, in order to address potential concerns relating to proposed field use of transgenic Mexfly. We describe a highly efficient method for transforming Mexfly, compare efficiency of piggyBac terminal sequences for transformation and also describe the derivation of a transposon-free insertion line. The development of an efficient transformation system for Mexfly holds great promise for improved applications of the sterile insect technique, a major component of the present control measures for this economically important pest species.