Inhibitory effects of tripeptides to enzymatic activity and life cycle parameters of Anticarsia gemmatalis

Chemical pesticides are the main tool used to handle lepidopteran insects in agriculture. However, in addition to causing environmental problems, the insects have acquired resistance to these molecules. Thus, the development of environmentally friendly biopesticides with higher specificity, such as organic protease inhibitors, has been encouraged. This work evaluated the inhibitory effects of two tripeptides, Pep1 and Pep2, obtained by removing the cleavage site of tripeptidyl substrates for trypsin-like proteases. Anticarsia gemmatalis were used as biochemical model and the trypsin-like activity of larvae exposed to different dosages of the tripeptides and protease inhibitors merged in an artificial diet was evaluated. Further, we selected one dose of each tripeptide to set a biological assay, where the total-proteolytic, cysteine-proteases, chymotrypsin-like and trypsin-like activities were determined. The tripeptides shown to have potential to inhibit trypsin-like serine proteases of A. gemmatalis midgut, being the lowest activity detected at doses of 170.4 μM and 251.2 μM for Pep1 and Pep2, respectively. The survival curves obtained using Kaplan-Meier estimators indicated that Pep2 and Pep1 affected survival when comparing to the control group. However, the effect of Pep1 on survival was more pronounced indicating the lowest percent of survival at the end of the larval phase (20%). In addition, larvae exposed to Pep1 maintained normal total proteolytic activity at the expense of the activities of chymotrypsin-like and cysteine proteases. Collectively, our findings revealed that the tripeptides, especially Pep1, exhibit toxic effects on A. gemmatalis and should be tested against other lepidopteran insects.