Novel Approaches to the Sustainable Control of Crop Insect Pests

粮食安全在政治和社会议程上都占有重要地位。不断变化的农业条件以及环境变化正在导致虫害成为对可持续作物生产的更严重威胁。目前的许多合成农药不仅影响害虫，而且还影响非靶标昆虫，包括益虫：因此它们是高度非特异性的。由于缺乏特异性，许多合成杀虫剂在整个欧洲都被禁止。这些因素推动了寻找防治农作物害虫的替代方法的需要，这些方法对目标害虫更具针对性，因此对环境的破坏更小。因此，该项目将致力于从一系列生物来源中寻找新的生物杀虫剂，用于控制作物害虫。首先，将对潜在来源进行筛选，以确定其对主要农作物害虫的生物活性。除了使用微生物作为生物杀虫剂外，选定的候选分子也将在微生物系统中表达。将针对害虫内的特定生化和生理目标，以显著减少非目标影响。这种新型生物杀虫剂可能来自于从环境样本中收集真菌或细菌。

Food security features highly on both the political and social agenda. Changing conditions in agriculture, as well as environmental changes, are leading to insect pests becoming a more serious threat to sustainable crop production. Many current synthetic pesticides not only affect the pest insect, but also non-target insects, including beneficial insects: therefore they are highly nonspecific. As a consequence of their lack of specificity, many synthetic pesticides are being banned throughout Europe. These factors have driven the need to identify alternative approaches to controlling insect pests of crops, which are more specific for the target pest and consequently less environmentally damaging.Therefore, this project will aim to identify novel biopesticides from a range of biological sources, which can be used to control insect pests of crops. In the first instance potential sources will be screened for biological activity against key pests of agricultural crops. In addition to using microbials as biopesticides, selected candidate molecules will also expressed in microbial systems. Specific biochemical and physiological targets within the pest will be targeted so as to significantly reduce non-target effects. Such novel biopesticides could come from collection of fungi or bacteria from environmental samples.