Impact of transgenic insect-resistant maize HGK60 with Cry1Ah gene on community components and biodiversity of arthropods in the fields

RESEARCH ARTICLE Impact of transgenic insect-resistant maize HGK60 with Cry1Ah gene on community components and biodiversity of arthropods in the fields Yanjun Chen1,2☯, Mengyun Ren3☯, Libo Pan1, Bo Liu1, Xiao GuanID1*, Jun Tao2* 1 Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing, P.R. China, 2 College of Tropical Crops, Hainan University, Haikou, P.R. China, 3 Institute of Crops and Nuclear Technology Utilization, Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Hangzhou, P.R. China ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * cynthia815@126.com (XG); taoj@hainu.edu.cn (JT) Abstract In recent years, transgenic technology has developed rapidly, but the risk of the environ- mental release of transgenic organisms is still a key issue. Research on the impact on biodi- versity is an effective way to objectively evaluate the risk. By taking transgenic maize HGK60 with insect-resistant gene Cry1Ah and common maize Zheng 58 as control, a 2- year experiment of arthropod community biodiversity in fields of them were studied using three methods.in 2019 and 2020. The results showed that a total of 124 species and 38537 individuals were observed from the experiment, belonging to 11 orders and 40 families. There was no significant difference in the individual number and species number of herbivo- rous, predatory and parasitic groups in the two kinds of maize in two years. Only the individ- ual number of HGK60 was significantly higher than that of common maize Zheng 58 at heading stage in 2019. And the percentages of individual number and species number in dif-

ferent groups were basically the same in the two kinds of maize at each stage in two years. Analyses of Richness index, Shannon-Wiener diversity index, Dominance index and Even- ness index showed no significant difference between the two kinds of maize in two years. The similarity coefficient of the arthropod community suggested that the arthropod commu- nity composition of HGK60 was similar to that of common maize Zheng 58. Furthermore, HGK60 had no significant effect on the relative stability of the arthropod community. These results indicated that despite the presence of a relatively minor difference in arthropod com- munity between the two kinds of maize, the planting of HGK60 had little effect on arthropod community biodiversity. The results provided some data and support for the further studies of environmental risk of transgenic crops. PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269459 June 3, 2022 1 / 13 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Chen Y, Ren M, Pan L, Liu B, Guan X, Tao J (2022) Impact of transgenic insect-resistant maize HGK60 with Cry1Ah gene on community components and biodiversity of arthropods in the fields. PLoS ONE 17(6): e0269459. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0269459 Editor: Sengottayan Senthil-Nathan, Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, INDIA Received: July 14, 2021 Accepted: May 20, 2022 Published: June 3, 2022 Copyright: © 2022 Chen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which

permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files Funding: This study was funded by The National Science and Technology Major Project of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2016ZX08012005). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The authors received no specific funding for this work.