Ectopic transgene expression in butterfly imaginal wing discs using vaccinia virus

and larval wing tissue, we examined the use of vaccinia virus. It has been reported that vaccinia virus, a vertebrate poxvirus, is able to infect gypsy moth cell lines in vitro (9). The vaccinia virus enters the gypsy moth cells and carries out both early and late viral protein synthesis as well as viral DNA replication (9). However, processing of viral late proteins does not occur, and therefore infectious virions are not produced. In this study, we set out to determine whether vaccinia virus could be used as a gene expression vector to ectopically express transgenes on the wings of butterflies in vivo.