Development of Lepidopteran Cell Lines

Ever since the early reports of Goldschmidt (1 ) and Trager (2 ) on the in vitro cultivation of lepidopteran tissues, researchers have been interested in using lepidopteran cell cultures for investigations in insect pathology, genetics, and physiology. With the successful development of continuous cell lines by Gaw et al. (3 ) and Grace (4 ), interest in the use of lepidopteran cell cultures increased dramatically (5 –9 ). As a result of this increased interest, over 150 lepidopteran continuous cell lines were reported by 1991 (10 –4 ), and several additional cell lines have been developed from lepidoptera since then (15 – 17 , Sohi unpublished data). With the recent advances in biotechnology and the development of baculovirus expression vectors, lepidopteran cell cultures have become invaluable for basic biological and biotechnological research (18 , 19 ).