Every summer resident knows that the main enemy of potatoes is the Colorado potato beetle, which devours the tops of this crop with both cheeks..
To protect the harvest, says Anastasia Kovrizhnykh, an expert of the online publication ‘BelNovosti’, agronomist, landscape designer, some gardeners spend almost all their time in the beds, trying to collect beetles and remove larvae from the leaves. Others prefer to fight pests with chemicals, but these means often prove ineffective..
Scientists have tried to uncover the reasons for the resistance of the Colorado potato beetle to insecticides.
To do this, they sequenced the pest’s genome. As a result, it was concluded that beetles living in different regions showed resistance to different types of insecticides, and the insect genes quickly mutated, acquiring resistance to new chemicals.
This is due to the fact that Colorado beetles were among the first to be controlled chemically.
In this regard, it can be assumed that the effectiveness of insecticides that will be developed in the future will be low.
However, the researchers do not intend to give up: genomic experiments will continue to develop other strategies to combat the parasite that lives in potato beds.
It is possible that scientists will have to use the genome editing method to take control of the beetle’s activity.
