What if the key to managing a crop pest lies partly in the bacteria living inside it? 🦠 There’s still plenty to uncover, but these findings are an exciting step towards understanding how the endosymbionts inside crop pests might offer new opportunities for sustainable control. Take a look below to discover what the team found. 👇
🦠 Tiny microbes inside aphids could change how Russian wheat aphids spread and damage crops❗ Check out a new paper published by our very own Xinyue Gu titled - ‘Novel but stable endosymbionts have contrasting effects on aphid dispersal and plant feeding damage in the cereal pest Diuraphis noxia’ Coauthors: Alex Gill, Qiong Yang, Perran Ross, Lucy Hayward, Monica Stelmach, Paul Umina, Sheik N. Doomun, Mel Berran, Lauren Coakley, Sonia Sharma and Ary Hoffmann DOI: https://lnkd.in/gaBftbnj The Russian wheat aphid (Diuraphis noxia) is a serious threat to Australian cereal growers. Large losses can occur through quick generational turnover and can spread easily by wing dispersal. While even at low densities, their feeding causes leaf damage and rolling, making them harder to control with conventional insecticides. For Australian grain growers, finding new ways to manage this pest is important. In this paper, their research has uncovered a possibility: the tiny bacteria 🦠 living inside an aphid🪲 can change how that aphid behaves and how much damage it causes to a plant, which can be useful for sustainable pest control. Introducing two naturally occurring bacteria, called Rickettsiella and Regiella from other aphids into Russian wheat aphids has shown two different bacteria living inside the same pest produced very different outcomes. Key Findings: 🦠 One endosymbiont, Rickettsiella, increased the severity of damage but decreased aphid dispersal 🍂 The other, Regiella, decreased damage severity without impacting dispersal. ‼️ These contrasting effects may be associated with changes in aphid population growth and wing formation but were not linked to key plant immune response pathways. Why does this matter ❓ These findings suggest that an aphid is more than just the insect we see on the plant. The microscopic organisms living inside can also influence how quickly pest populations grow, how much damage they cause, and how they spread through a crop. A new direction for pest management ❓ The research shows that it may be possible to influence a pest by changing the microbial community living inside it. In the longer term, this could open the door to new biological approaches that work alongside existing pest-management tools. The key message is simple: what happens inside an aphid can affect what happens to the crop. Understanding these microbial partners could give us a new way to tackle some of Australia's important crop pests. Much more to discover to understand how these interactions work for these tiny microbes! Grains Research and Development Corporation (UOM1906-002RTX and UOM2404-006RT), Hort Innovation (ST23002), with support from Cesar Australia and University of Melbourne. #Russianwheataphid #endosymbionts #aphids #aphidmanagement
