Sweet Corn Sentinel Monitoring for Lepidopteran Field-Evolved Resistance to Bt Toxins
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As part of an insect resistance management plan to preserve Bt transgenic technology, annual monitoring of target pests is mandated to detect susceptibility changes to Bt toxins. Currently Helicoverpa zea (Boddie) monitoring involves investigating unexpected injury in Bt crop fields and collecting larvae from non-Bt host plants for laboratory diet bioassays to determine mortality responses to diagnostic concentrations of Bt toxins. To date, this monitoring approach has not detected any significant change from the known range of baseline susceptibility to Bt toxins, yet practical field-evolved resistance in H. zea populations and numerous occurrences of unexpected injury occur in Bt crops. In this study, we implemented a network of 73 sentinel sweet corn trials, spanning 16 U.S. states and 4 Canadian provinces, for monitoring changes in H. zea susceptibility to Cry and Vip3A toxins by measuring differences in ear damage and larval infestations between isogenic pairs of non-Bt and Bt hybrids over three years. This approach can monitor susceptibility changes and regional differences in other ear-feeding lepidopteran pests. Temporal changes in the field efficacy of each toxin were evidenced by comparing our current results with earlier published studies, including baseline data for each Bt trait when first commercialized. Changes in amount of ear damage showed significant increases in H. zea resistance to Cry toxins and possibly lower susceptibility to Vip3a. Our findings demonstrate that the sentinel plot approach as an in-field screen can effectively monitor phenotypic resistance and document field-evolved resistance in target pest populations, improving resistance monitoring for Bt crops.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it