baculovirus

Baculoviruses are a virus family which probably originated 400 to 450 million years ago and are ubiquitous in the modern environment (Heimpel et al. 1973). Apart from ancient Chinese literature, the earliest evidence of baculoviruses in Western literature can be traced to the sixteenth century by Marco Vida of Cremona describing gory liquefaction of silk worms (reviewed in Benz, 1986). Starting from the 1940’s baculoviruses were used and studied widely as biopestisides in crop fields (Miller, 1997). In the 1930’s a specific baculovirus from Finland was successfully introduced to Canada to abolish spruce sawfly, Gilpinia hercyniae (Arif, 2005; Balch & Bird, 1944). Since the late 80’s and 90’s they have been utilized as production of complex eukaryotic proteins in insect cell cultures (Kost & Condreay, 1999) and later on for viral display and gene therapy(Oker-Blom et al. 2003).