07/14/2002 (Asia Intelligence Wire) - SIX years ago, Ruslan Abdullah setout to genetically engineer oil palm trees to make them resistant to anasty pest called the bagworm. He's bagged the worm.In the isolated nethouse near his lab at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia'sSchool of BioSciences and Biotechnology, Ruslan's bagworm- resistant treeshave become a hell for this pest.He has released huge numbers of the bagworm on those oil palms. Oh, thebagworms munch the palms all right. But over 35 days, they eat, dehydrate,shrivel up and die by slow starvation because they can no longer digestthe fronds, their favourite food.The fronds, and the rest of the tree, contain a protease inhibitor.Protease, produced by the bagworm's digestive system, breaks down proteinsit consumes into amino acids, the building blocks of life. The bagwormneeds this enzyme for digestion but the inhibitor, now built into thetree, disables protease and makes digestion impossible.In Ruslan's set of controls - ordinary oil palm trees - the bagworms aretruly happy."The implanted gene is stable in the plant,"says Ruslan."It's showing upin every part of the tree. I take this as a good sign, a signal that wecan move on to the next phase."The next step would be tests for other kinds of insects, includingassorted caterpillars and the rhinocerous beetle, which likes to eat themeristem of young palms and kills them. Later, he will need to devise asystem to introduce the same gene into planting material.Ruslan's first batch of bagworm resistant trees is five years old.They've grown so tall they will soon burst through the roof of the securenethouse."I'll have to renovate, extend the height,"says Ruslan. Frondsfrom those 24 trees are about six metres tall. Their trunk diameter isabout 30 centimetres.He has since created four more generations to ensure that the geneticengineering part can be repeated systematically. There are now about 100trees in the nethouse, and in his lab, another 100 very young trees stillin test tubes. The trees represent the three oil palm varieties here - thedura, pisifera and the hybrid, tenera.The resistance to bagworm in those trees comes from the protease inhibitorgene found in the cowpea plant. The cowpea is resistant to worms.Researchers at Cornell University isolated the gene several years ago, andtested it by implanting it into tobacco and beans, making them resistantto worms too.When Ruslan started work on this project using this same gene, it was withsome trepidation."There's a big difference between an oil palm tree and acowpea plant, or beanstalks,"says Ruslan."Scientists used to think the oilpalm couldn't be genetically engineered to give it desirable qualities.But given oil palm's problems associated with pests, it would have beenunfair not to try."Pests are a serious matter in oil palm plantations. The bagworm, aplanter's nightmare, slashes productivity by as much as 43 per cent.Bagworms eat the leaves until the fronds look like skeletons. Some leaftissue is used to make the bag. When the foliage drops off the tree, nophotosynthesis takes place. In the end, no fruits are produced.Unlike other pests, spraying insecticide is difficult because the worm issafe in the protective bag it builds around itself. Catching it in itshatch cycle is tricky. The only thing that works is picking them off byhand, which besides being extremely labour-intensive, is practical onlywith short trees. Two cycles of bagworm is considered infestation.For a truly bagworm-free future, the oil palm tree will need to pass onthe gene to its young. Already, Ruslan has found the gene in its pollenand the mesocarp of the fruit."My next investigation is to see if the geneis present in the female reproductive parts of the flower."For this - to examine whether or not the gene moves from generation togeneration - Ruslan and his team have received a 2002 IRPA grant forRM390,000. Next in Ruslan's agenda is to study gene targeting, a sciencethat overcomes non-specific insertion of genes engineered into plants.But what about toxicity, particularly to ruminants that graze inplantations and eat fallen fronds?"Mammals don't react to proteaseinhibitors at all,"says Ruslan."Still, I'd like to test this in a range ofanimals that may hang around an oil palm plantation."In nature, oil palm does not cross with other plants easily, not even withcoconut, although that was the source of the bagworm in the first place.And since all its wild relatives live in Africa, it's not likely thatbagworm resistance in oil palm will pass on to other crops or plantspecies.

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