Bioengineered plants help produce moth pheromones for pest control

Pheromones are often used by farmers for controlling pest insects but the chemical process for producing them is expensive. A method for making them using bioengineered oil plants could be cheaper

ENVIRONMENT 1 September 2022

By James Dinneen

A bioengineered oilseed plant can produce a moth sex pheromone molecule used to control insect pests.

Pheromones are chemical signals that cause a behavioural response in members of the same or closely related species. For decades, farmers have used pheromones to keep pest insects away from high-value crops like apples and grapes, for instance by baiting traps with the chemicals or saturating fields with them to make it difficult for the insects to find mates. But the chemical process for making pheromones is too expensive to use for lower-value row crops like maize, soybeans and cotton.

Hong-Lei Wang at Lund University in Sweden and his colleagues bioengineered plants to produce a sex pheromone molecule secreted by two damaging pest species: female diamondback moths (Plutella xylostella) and cotton bollworms (Helicoverpa armigera).

The team used the bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens to introduce two genes into the oilseed plant Camelina sativa.