A Facile-Synthesized Star Polycation Constructed as a Highly Efficient Gene Vector in Pest Management

Abstract

Gene vectors have been extensively applied in various fields. However, the high economic cost of gene vectors limits their development and application, and there is an urgent demand for developing highly efficient gene vectors with low cost, especially for large-scale application. Here, we reported a simple but effective star polycation as a gene vector for pest management. Our polycation was constructed by commercial and cheap material sources, and the facile synthesis procedure was simplified to two reaction steps, decreasing the cost to a large extent. This vector showed a low cytotoxicity as well as a high gene delivery efficacy into live cells. The vector-doublestranded RNA (dsRNA) down-regulated the pest key developmental gene expression to inhibit the pest growth. Our work provides an efficient gene vector with low cost for scientific researches, which may also promote the practice and development of RNA interference (RNAi)-based pest management.