Hypoxia-induced immortalization of Helicoverpa armigera pupal ovarian cells.

Authors

Wenyi Jin, Yan Tong, Xuan Li, Qian Meng, Lin Guo, Huixian Shi, Qin Kang, Jihong Zhang, Qilian Qin, Huan Zhang

Published in

iScience. Volume 29. Issue 8. Pages 117019. Aug 21, 2026. Epub Jul 30, 2026.

Abstract

Establishing continuous cell lines from lepidopteran insects is notoriously inefficient, with success rates typically below 5% and often below 1%, severely limiting research and biopesticide development for pests such as Helicoverpa armigera (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae). We present a simple, reproducible method, hypoxia-induced immortalization that dramatically improves this efficiency. By applying a brief hypoxic stimulus (5% O₂, 7 days) during primary culture of pupal ovary cells, we achieved an overall success rate of 17.8% across four independent batches, more than 3-fold higher than conventional normoxic methods. This high efficiency enabled the generation of eight continuous cell lines from the pupal ovaries, allowing systematic comparative analysis of early-passage dynamics. As a proof of concept, the IOZCAS-Ha-8 cell line exhibits high susceptibility to both homologous and heterologous baculoviruses. Hypoxia-induced immortalization provides a reproducible, high-throughput platform for generating well-characterized insect cell lines, facilitating studies on insect-virus interactions and biological control.

PMID:
42571379
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 09 Aug 2026.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.