Validation of ion channel pesticide targets in Drosophila

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The world's population is expected to nearly double in the next fifty years. The increasing demands on Canadian agriculture to meet this need mean that we must have available pesticides that protect crops while minimizing the impact on the environment and human health. Unfortunately, the currently used pesticides are increasingly seen as posing unacceptable environmental risks while the pests they are meant to eliminate are developing resistance. To identify novel targets for the development of new, safer pesticides, we are using genomics to learn more about genes and proteins that are specific to insects. In particular, we have found that insects have unusual ion channels, proteins that regulate the flow of ions across membranes of all cells, not found in other organisms. Because ion channels have traditionally been good targets for the development of pesticides, we believe that pesticides that target these insect-specific ion channels will be effective and have minimal impact on other animals. The aim of this project is to prove that that two unusual channels play an important role in insect physiology and hence a drug disrupting their function would be an effective insecticide.