Novel Approaches to the Sustainable Control of Crop Insect Pests

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.