Silkworm eggs: An ideal model for studying the biological effects of low energy Ar ion interaction in animals

The object of the current work was to study low energy Ar⁺ ion beam interactions with silkworm eggs and thus provide further understanding of the mechanisms involved in ion bombardment-induced direct gene transfer into silkworm eggs. In this paper, using low-energy Ar⁺ ion beam bombardment combined with piggyBac transposon, we developed a novel method to induce gene transfer in silkworm. Using bombardment conditions optimized for egg-incubation (25 keV with ion fluences of 800 × 2.6 × 10¹⁵ ions/cm² in dry state under vacuum), vector pBac{3 × P3-EGFPaf} and helper plasmid pHA3pig were successfully transferred into the silkworm eggs. Our results obtained from by PCR assay and genomic Southern blotting analysis of the G1 generations provide evidence that low-energy ion beam can generate some craters that play a role in acting as pathways of exogenous DNA molecules into silkworm eggs.