Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Minsheng You, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, for kindly providing specimens of the P. xylostella DBM strain ‘Fuzhou lab’; Dr. Takashi Yamamoto (DuPont Pioneer) for providing Bt proteins; and Yingbo Mao, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, who kindly provided the pBSK intron vector. The project was funded by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2013 – 2014) and Postdoctoral Research Program of Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences (2013 – 2015).