A new way to produce pheromones as a crop pest repellent in United Kingdom
Camelina Seed
United Kingdom
Published Sep 3, 2022
Tridge summary
A team of researchers from Sweden, China and the U.S. has developed a much cheaper way to produce pheromones as a crop pest repellent. In their paper published in the journal Nature Sustainability, the group describes how they genetically altered a plant to force it to produce a pheromone that could be used as a pest repellent. Johnathan Napier with Rothamsted Research, in the U.K., has published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue outlining the work done by the team on this new effort.
Original content
As the dangers of using pesticides on crops become more apparent, scientists have ramped up efforts to find safer alternatives. In this new effort, the researchers took another look at using pheromones.Most pesticides work by killing the pests that feed on crop plants. While efficient, such chemicals have also been found to kill beneficial insects such as pollinators. One safer alternative that has been tried is the use of pheromones. Such chemicals are produced by bugs to attract mates. Flooding an area with artificially made chemicals confuses the bugs and prevents them from mating. Unfortunately, making pheromones on an industrial scale has proven to be too expensive. In this new effort, the researchers took a new approach—engineering a plant to produce them.The work involved studying the genes of a certain pest and finding which are responsible for pheromone production. They next cut those DNA strands from the bugs' genome and added them to the genome of a plant. The plant the ...
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