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

stages. For parasitic group and neutral group, the coefficients were slightly lower, that only reached highly similar level at full ripe stage. It can be seen from Table 3 that in the 2-year experiment, the stability of arthropod commu- nity in HGK60 and Z58 maize fields showed little difference in the same growth period. The difference of Nd/Np between HGK60 and Z58 was significant only in the seedling stage of 2020, while the difference of Nn/Np, Sn/Sp and Sd/Sp were not significant in each growth period in the 2 years. In general, the stability indexes of arthropod community of HGK60 and Z58 were relatively stable, that indicated that the planting of HGK60 did not interfere with the regulation of natural group and neutral group on herbivorous group in arthropod community. 4. Discussion In this study, the results showed that there was no significant difference on the composition, diversity indexes, similarity coefficient and relative stability of the arthropod community between transgenic insect-resistant maize (HGK60) and the non-GM maize. Previous studies have found that the impact of transgenic crops on soil fauna, resulting in minimal to no effects on biodiversity [4,18,30–32]. Guo et al. [33] suggested that transgenic Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) maize had little effect on natural enemy community biodiversity. It is well known that transgenic insect-resistant maize can specifically kill target insects, so it is common to study its nontarget effects on the biodiversity of natural enemy communities [22]. Wang et al. [22]

investigated the composition and abundance of arthropod community in transgenic maize fields for two years in Beijing. As for the number of species, individuals, community diversity indexes, similarity coefficient and relative stability of arthropod community, the results Fig 2. The percentage of the species number and individual number of arthropods on HGK60 and Z58 in 2019 and 2020. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269459.g002 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 7 / 13