Fern proteins fight crop pests, could usher in potent new insecticides

The pretty ferns that adorn windowsills and gardens have some surprising powers. Biologists have long known that this ancient group of plants wards off hungry insects better than other flora, and now they’re homing in on why. They’ve discovered fern proteins that kill and deter pests, including, most recently, one that shows promise against bugs resistant to widely used natural pesticides. The new protein, described last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ), adds to a growing arsenal that could one day provide a fresh alternative to chemical insecticides. “These proteins have great potential and may represent a new mode of pesticide action,” says Juan Luis Jurat-Fuentes, an entomologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They are exciting, says Kristina Sepčić, a biochemist at the University of Ljubljana, because they “have proven to be active against insect [populations] resistant to certain bacterial toxins.” Since the late 1930s, proteins isolated from a soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringensis (Bt) have become a mainstay of natural pest control. They were first used as an insecticidal spray, but more recently scientists engineered genes for these proteins into crops. Farmers around the world planted more than 100 million hectares of these transgenic plants in 2019. Transgenic corn and cotton alone saved growers more than $50 billion in lost crops in the first 2 decade...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news