Archive for March, 2016

How nematodes ‘customise’ the crops they eat

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Invisible to the naked eye, nematodes that parasitize plants are a huge threat to agriculture, causing billions of dollars in crop losses every year.

New research shows that these tiny worms use a specialized hormone to help them feed from the plant—a finding that could one day lead to crop plants with enhanced resistance to these devastating agricultural pests.

“Cell cycle regulation is a key aspect of plant development and one of the first events altered during the formation of the feeding sites nematodes use to acquire nutrients from host plants,” says Melissa Goellner Mitchum, a researcher at the Bond Life Sciences Center and a plant sciences professor at the University of Missouri.

“These discoveries led scientists to suspect that cytokinin, a hormone that promotes cell division in plants, might play a key role in feeding site formation for nematode parasites.”

Doctoral student Carola De La Torre and postdoctoral fellow Demosthenis Chronis worked with Mitchum to determine if nematode infection alters the cytokinin signaling pathways plants use to regulate growth and development and how the process changes due to nematode infection.

“As part of our research, we examined the activation of different components of the cytokinin pathway in response to nematode infection,” De La Torre says. “Also, we evaluated numerous plants that lacked the presence of these components and found that most of these plants were less susceptible to nematode infection.

“These results suggested to us that these little worms are not only utilizing parts of a plant hormonal pathway that is important for plant growth and development, but they also are doing it in a way that allows them to cause disease.”

Mitchum’s team worked with Florian Grundler’s group at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University of Bonn, Germany, who further analyzed the connection between cytokinin and nematodes. Using advanced genetic tools, they discovered that nematodes create their own form of plant cytokinin and that, by secreting the hormone into the plant, they actively control the cell cycle leading to the production of ideal feeding sites to support their development.

These findings show the ability of an animal to synthesize and secrete a functional plant hormone to establish long-term parasitism.

“Understanding how plant-parasitic nematodes modulate host plants to their own benefit is an essential first step in finding new technologies needed to develop crop plants with enhanced resistance to these devastating agricultural pests,” Mitchum says.

Source: Sheena Davis for University of Missouri

Advantages of using biopesticides compared to chemical pesticides

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Biopesticides, also known as biological controls or biocontrols, are organisms used to manage pests or diseases and are most notably used in agriculture. Biopesticides use natural food chains to manage pests and diseases by taking advantage of predator-prey or parasite-host relationships. With this method, growers can sustainably manage crop pests without harming non-target organisms, the environment or humans.

There are a few types of organisms which are typically used: natural predators, predatory mites, parasitoids, fungi and nematodes. The species chosen are isolated and thoroughly researched before only the best solutions make it to market.

Advantages of biopesticides (or biocontrols):

  1. Effect on non-target species

Biological control products typically target a narrow range of pests or diseases while non-target organisms, such as birds, bees, fish, humans and beneficial soil organisms, remain unaffected.

  1. Pollution

Since biological controls are naturally occurring organisms, at the end of their life they completely biodegrade and leave no harmful residues on the crop or in the environment. This feature helps promote the safety and well-being of people who work on farms and the environment.

  1. Cost

Biological control, as a part of IPM, works to achieve sustainable management of pests and diseases, keeping the pressure well below economically damaging levels. Pests and diseases do not develop resistance to biological controls. Since the rate of application will only change with pest or disease pressure, farmers can accurately predict input costs.

  1. Pest resistance

Records have shown that pests tend to become resistant to conventional pesticides thus proving that it is not a long-term solution, something that never happens with the use of organic pesticides.

  1. Market

As the ordinary consumer became aware of the dangers posed by synthetic chemicals, demand for farm products that have undergone organic treatments rose. This makes the use of these chemicals a potential risk as there’s a glaring possibility of incurring huge losses due to the consumer shunning your product.

 

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