Smc 13-11-2017
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Presentation at the Science Media Centre, 13 Nov 2017 It is vital to find new ways to protect crops from pests. Approaches are briefly discussed and previous research on orange wheat blossom midge is provided as a success story. I am setting up a new group at Keele University which will test hypotheses geared toward better understanding insect-plant interactions and finding new way of managing pests.
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Smc 13-11-2017
- 1. Protecting Harvests from Pests Prof Toby Bruce
- 3. really ?
- 4. Environmental Health Human Health Crop Health Nutrition Ecosystem services Global security Why study insect-plant interactions and crop protection? 70% of (fresh) water use globally is for agriculture Health requires nutrition
- 5. Michelmore et al. (2017) MPMI
- 6. Pollinators
- 7. Birth rate Death rate Immigration rate Emigration rate
- 8. Agricultural environments are simplified and we’ve learnt that they are vulnerable to pests
- 9. The Challenge: THE APPLIED CHALLENGE!
- 10. Orange wheat blossom midge
- 11. OWBM Resistant crop varieties Females lay eggs, but larvae die when they start to feed A wound plug is formed at the feeding site due to lignification
- 12. Now approx. 60% of UK wheat is resistant OWBM Resistant crop varieties
- 13. Bruce et al. (2007) Pest Man. Sci. 63: 49 pheromone traps are now commercially available to wheat growers in the UK Monitoring systems OCOC3H7 OCOC3H7
- 14. Can pest management become symbiotic? From an ecological and evolutionary point of view, perhaps easier to work with beneficial insectsthan against pest insects?
- 15. Biological control of pests - either by release in glasshouses or encouraging natural populations outside.
- 16. Smart Cereals – egg induced
- 17. Pea and bean weevil, Sitona lineatus
- 18. 4-Methylheptane-3,5-dione Beauveria bassiana spores adhering to Entostat particles Sitona lineatus adults ♂ produced aggregation pheromone that attracts ♀s and ♂s Lure-and-killof pea and bean weevil, Sitona lineatus
- 19. Conclusions Study of Insect Plant- Interactions is a vital topic, needed to provide new solutions for managing insect pests and conserving beneficial insects
Editor's Notes
- Stemborers are devastating pests of staple cereals in sub-Saharan Africa that reduce yields by up to 80%. Recently we have discovered that certain landraces of maize have an inducible indirect defence trait, not present in commercial hybrids, that involves release of semiochemicals attractive to natural enemies of the stemborer after eggs are laid on the plant. The same semiochemicals are released by companion plants in the push-pull companion cropping system. If this novel defence trait could be bred into cereal cultivars with other favourable agronomic characteristics, crop losses could be saved without having to grow companion plants to release semiochemicals. This project is developing molecular markers for the defence trait that will allow breeders to introgress it into improved lines of maize and sorghum. The project involves growing many different lines of maize from which headspace samples of volatiles are collected and samples of DNA taken. Lines that show induction of semiochemicals after stemborer oviposition are tested in bioassays with stemborer parasitoids (key natural enemies) and will be grown in field plot trials to assess stemborer infestation levels. Genotyping by sequencing and subsequent association mapping is being used to map the trait to the genes responsible.
- Our innovative Agri-tech Catalyst project, is developing a “lure-and-kill” approach to manage agricultural pests. Currently blanket sprays of insecticide are used against the pea and bean weevil (Sitona lineatus) which attacks nitrogen fixing root nodules of field beans and peas and the bruchid beetle (Bruchus rufimanus) which severely reduces the saleable quality of field beans by burrowing holes in them. Instead of applying blanket sprays to the entire crop canopy, which is hard to penetrate and makes targeted application difficult, our vision is to lure the pests to a bait station containing small amounts of bioinsecticide which stick to the body of the pest. We are using an aggregation pheromone which attracts both sexes of the insect (i.e. it gets the females that lay the eggs that lead to the damaging larval stage). This will improve the targeting of the control measures and provide a much needed new solution because pyrethroid pesticide resistance is evolving in the pea and bean weevil.