Generation of baculovirus expression vectors

The baculovirus expression system has become an important tool for the expression of heterologous genes because it has several positives attributes. First, high quantities of protein are produced because the target genes are driven by strong viral promoters. Second, most eukaryotic posttranslational modifications are carried out in insect cells in an authentic manner. Thus, proteins expressed with the baculovirus expression system usually have the same activities as the authentic protein. Several approaches have been developed to obtain recombinant baculoviruses easily and nowadays many modified baculoviral DNAs and a huge variety of transfer plasmids are available. Here, we described the rapid generation of recombinant baculoviruses using parental viral DNA that incorporates a lethal deletion and can be selected against. This basic approach should be suitable for the majority of applications.