He has filed for a patent on the gene. Once ingested, the virus quickly replicates inside the earworm's gut cells. Here, we're flooding the insect with it. As a result, the pest soon stops eating and excretes much of its water. Because, says Raina, the hormone is made of a type of small protein called a peptide.
Peptides are expensive to produce, and they degrade quickly.
Also, you can't spray them onto a crop like you do an insecticide, and they don't penetrate the insect. But the baculovirus can get inside the earworm, making it an ideal delivery mechanism for the peptide hormone. Also, the technology exists for growing baculoviruses in special industrial vats. This could expedite the virus' development as a biopesticide product that growers could spray onto crops. In lab studies, at a temperature of 23 o C, hatchling corn earworms infected with the virus typically stopped eating after about 48 hours.