Effect of the anthracnose resistant transgenic chili pepper on the arthropod communities in a confined field = 야외 격리 포장에서 유전자 변형 탄저병 저항성 PepEST 고추가 절지동물 군집에 미치는 영향

Abstract

This study was conducted to assess the environmental risks of anthracnose resistant transgenic chili peppers with the PepEST gene on non-target organisms in the agroecosystem environments during the chili pepper growing seasons in 2006. We quantitatively collected arthropods assemblages living on leaves and flowers of chili peppers on June 20, July 25, and August 25 by using an insect vacuum collector to compare the patterns of arthropod community structures between non-transgenic chili peppers (nTR, WT512) and anthracnose resistant transgenic chili peppers (TR, line 68). We found the seasonal difference with the highest species richness and Shannon‘s diversity in July’s sampling among the growing seasons (P.0.05) and each sampling season showed the different arthropod community composition. We also found there was no statistical difference between the two types of crops, nTR and TR, at each sampling time (P.0.05). The significance level of arthropod community showed that there were lots of seasonal difference of functional groups as well as taxa but only the herbivore group in the functional groups was significantly different for the types of plants (P.0.05). So, we further examined the herbivore groups to find any potential damage and identified the possibility of herbivorous damage from some herbivores, grasshoppers, aphids and thrips. Although we couldn‘t find any adverse effects from the environmental risk assessment between the arthropod community structures on two types of plants from our results, we should keep working for the environmental risk assessment because of the herbivorous potential risk possibility.