Award details

Generating Whitefly-Resistant Plants

Reference	BBS/E/J/000CA487
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Saskia Hogenhout
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	John Innes Centre
Department	John Innes Centre Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	49,938
Status	Completed
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/05/2012
End date	30/04/2014
Duration	24 months

Abstract

Bemisia tabaci is a phloem-feeding whitefly that lives predominantly on herbaceous species. It is a considerable pest of ornamental, vegetable, grain legume, and cotton production, causing damage directly through feeding and indirectly through the transmission of plant pathogenic viruses. B. tabaci is distributed nearly worldwide and has risen in status to one of the most globally damaging pests of open field and protected crops. The whitefly’s ability to disperse is exacerbated by its extensive movement through commerce of plant products around the globe. In a new territory, its small size and rapid reproductive potential result in explosive population growth. This pest is a major threat for food security at a global scale, being the poorest areas of the world the most susceptible to its devastating effects. Although integrated crop management has been used to control Bemisia populations with limited success, insecticides are still the main control system. In addition to the potential undesirable impact of insecticides on the environment, whitefly populations have developed a high degree of resistance to several classes of chemical insecticides, which may render this solution useless in the near future. Of note, an innovative alternative method to control this pest with durable efficiency and without environmental side effects could rely on the use of specific RNA silencing. We have shown that we can silence specific genes of a phylogenetically closely related insect to whitefly, the green peach aphid Myzus persicae, by plant-mediated RNA interference (RNAi), i.e. by feeding this aphid species on plants that express transiently or stably double-stranded (ds) RNA to aphid genes. The overall purpose of this project is to investigate if we can use plant-mediated RNAi to generate whitefly-resistant plants. In the future, we will use this RNAi approach to generate whitefly-resistant crops.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Not funded via Committee
Research Topics	Crop Science, Plant Science
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

I accept the terms and conditions of use (opens in new window)

export PDF file

back to list new search