During mating season, amorous male insect pests roam gardens in search of love.
Then, the whole family terrorizes the plant world.
They chew on leaves, burrow in stems and spread dangerous pathogens among crops.
The researchers dub the tantalizing foliage “sexy plants,” or SxPs.
The teampublished a study that tests the altered plants' armory, in the 2021 volume of BioDesign Research.
That would ultimately confuse male insects so they can’t find their way to a female partner.
Consequently, targeted males would struggle to start a lineage, and they’d probably die out.
The team doesn’t propose that all plants get sexy.
Motivated to find an alternative, Orzaez and fellow researchers ran a test of the sexy plant mechanism.
They added the sexy upgrade to an Australian plant called Nicotiana benthamiana.
A close relative of tobacco, its list of archenemies includes moths.
Like butterflies, moths fall under the lepidopteran classification.
Orzaez says they could aid in other pest control strategies, too.
One such method is push-pull.
Push and pull pest control “pushes” bugs away from something with a feature they find unattractive.
Then, the pests are “pulled” toward another source.
Presumably, these pheromone-heavy plants could be the bait, taking attention away from their unmodified counterparts.
A more aggressive approach, the scientists note in their paper, could be the attract-and-kill technique.
But before getting to any of these steps, a bit of work needs to be done.
“Two main bottlenecks were identified,” the paper says.
The sexy plants had a lowered growth rate and poor pheromone release rate.
Perhaps all plants can’t be sexy, the team concluded.
