ABSTRACT
This chapter covers the use of insect cell cultures for foreign gene expression. Lepidopteran insect cells serve as the in vitro hosts for baculoviruses, which are one of the most widely used expression vectors available. One can construct a recombinant baculovirus that contains the foreign gene of interest, add the recombinant virus to an insect cell culture, and obtain high level expression of the foreign gene product. The most recent work on stable transformation and foreign gene expression with Drosophila cell lines has been carried out by Rosenberg and coworkers. A cloned gene can be placed under the control of an appropriate transcriptional promoter, added to insect cells, and a cell subpopulation can be selected that contains the new gene and will express it continuously, in the absence of viral infection. The enveloped virions then can fuse with midgut epithelial cells and migrate to the nucleus, where they uncoat and replicate.
