Insecticidal bioassays are the only reliable method to investigate the biological activity of an insecticidal protein and therefore provide an essential toolkit for the characterization and potency determination of these proteins. Here we present a standardized method for a lepidopteran larval bioassay, which is optimized to specifically estimate activity of insecticidal proteins produced in transgenic plants. The treatment can be either applied to the surface of the artificial diet, or blended into the diet.
Keywords: Diet incorporation assay; Diet surface assay; European corn borer (ECB); Insecticidal bioassays; Insecticidal proteins; Larval bioassay.