NUCLEOTIDE-SEQUENCE OF THE GENE ENCODING NOVEL DELTA-ENDOTOXIN FROM BACILLUS-THURINGIENSIS SEROVAR JAPONENSIS STRAIN BUIBUI SPECIFIC TO SCARABAEID BEETLES

A new isolate of Bacillus thuringiensis serovar japonensis strain Buibui, which was specific to scarab beetles (M. Ohba et al., Lett. Appl. Microbiol, 14:54, 1992), was shown to have a 130-kDa insecticidal crystal protein (ICP) (H. Hori et al., J. Appl. Bacteriol, 76:307, 1994). ClaI restriction enzyme fragments of total cell DNA of the isolate were cloned into E. coli (Sate et al., Curr. Microbiol. 28:15, 1994), Whole 3480-bp nucleotide sequence of the gene encoding 130-kDa ICP was determined, and the molecular weight of the ICP was estimated to be 130,424. The strongly conserved five blocks that occur in almost all ICP genes of B. thuringiensis were detected in the ORF with the same order and almost the same intervals as elsewhere. The amino acid sequence homologies of the whole ICP or N-terminus half portion to that of the CryIIIA, B, C, D, and CryV were about 35%.