Progress of antiviral mechanisms in the mulberry silkworm: A review

The silkworm Bombyx mori is both an important economic insect and also exploited as a powerful biological model system. Silkworm larvae often suffer from viral infections, especially the nuclear polyhedrosis virus, causing great losses to the sericulture. Insects have evolved many different ways to defend themselves against pathogens like fungi, bacteria, nematodes, but little is known about the insect immune response against viral infections. To date, several efforts have been made by very few workers to identify the proteins related to the resistance of baculovirus in the silkworm, but no satisfactory researches are reported about the resistant gene of baculovirus. In the present article, the ways of viral infection and certain antiviral proteins involved in silkworm immunity are discussed.