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

arthropod community in the fields, field biosafety evaluation is a long-term research process, which needs to be tested in multiple locations for many years to enrich the repeated test results, for getting a more comprehensive and reliable conclusion. It should be noticed that there was a limitation of the study that we didn´t sample the arthropods in the different soil profiles. This will be our research direction in the future. The research on the impact of biodiversity is a necessary link for the safe release of geneti- cally modified crops in the environment. At present, experts and scholars have done a lot of research on the rhizosphere soil microorganisms [46–51], insects [34,36,41], weeds [14] of genetically modified crops. However, the conclusions are not the same. The differences of research results indicate that the effects of genetically modified crops on biodiversity were not the same. The differences of receptor types, exogenous genes, selection evaluation indexes and research methods may affect the research results. Therefore, the safety evaluation of genetically modified crops should follow the "case by case principle" [52]. From the ecological security perspective of GM maize, the planting scale and time are relatively limited, and the direct and indirect ecological risks are still unclear. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct long-term multi- site and multi-level systematic monitoring to ensure the safety of environmental ecosystems containing transgenic maize. 5. Conclusion

In this study, the planting of HGK60 had no significant influence on the composition, diversity indexes, similarity coefficient and relative stability of the arthropod community in the fields during 2-year experiment. The difference only occurs in individual growth period, and does not continue to appear in the whole growth period, such as the number of individuals in the neutral groups of HGK60 was significantly higher than that of Z58 only at heading stage in 2019, while the difference of Nd/Np between HGK60 and Z58 was significant only at the seed- ling stage in 2020. Furthermore, biosafety assessment for field crops is a long-term research process that requires long-term monitoring of GMOs approved for large-scale release to obtain more comprehensive evaluation results. Supporting information S1 Table. Patterns of the arthropod community in the fields in different orders, families and species. (DOCX) S2 Table. The number of arthropods in each growth period (heads). (DOCX) S1 Raw data. (XLSX) Author Contributions Conceptualization: Yanjun Chen, Bo Liu, Xiao Guan, Jun Tao. Data curation: Yanjun Chen, Mengyun Ren. Formal analysis: Yanjun Chen, Mengyun Ren. Investigation: Yanjun Chen, Mengyun Ren. Methodology: Xiao Guan, Jun Tao. PLOS ONE Impact of transgenic insect-resistant maize HGK60 with Cry1Ah gene PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269459 June 3, 2022 10 / 13