Catching flies with worms

How can we kill pests that damage our crops and harm livestock without collateral damage to our precious ecosystems? This is an urgent question for the 21st century. As ever, understanding your ‘enemy’ is a good strategy. Biologists have a key role to play here by providing insight into the neural mechanisms that are vital to the survival of the pest, in particular the chemosensory processing that enables them to interact in a very precise manner with their environment- how do they detect their host? -how do they detect a mate? This processing is controlled by odors and by the components of the nervous system called ‘receptors’ that specifically detect them in a given pest. Understanding this will help with developing control strategies that are detrimental to pests and leave other organisms unharmed. But studying this in the pests themselves is technically challenging, especially because pests that grow in their host are very difficult to study without harming the host. To circumvent this sort of problem biologists often use ‘model’ systems. We are using a microscopic nematode worm, Caernorhabditis elegans as an experimental platform to characterise the chemosensory components of the nervous systems of pests. C. elegans is non-pathogenic, lives in the soil and is very easy to work with in the lab. Essentially the approach involves genetic techniques that allow you to take chemosensory receptors from the pest and express them (i.e., put them), in the nematode nervous system. Once these ‘transgenic’ worms are created we can test their attraction to, or repulsion from, odors that are potential host signals or pheromones. In this way, we can resolve the signals in the environment that are essential for the pest to find a host or mate, and also identify the pest receptor that detects the signal. Confirmation of the accuracy of this prediction can be made in the pest itself, before exploring ways to use this new knowledge to trap or stop the pest in its tracks.

Speaker

Lindy Holden-Dye

LE STUDIUM Visiting Researcher

FROM: University of Southampton - UK 
IN RESIDENCE AT: Infectiology and Public Health (ISP) / Centre INRAE Val de Loire, University of Tours - FR