Integrated pest management has historically placed great hopes on host plant resistance. However, conventional host-plant resistance to insects involves quantitative traits at several loci. As a result, the progress has been slow and difficult to achieve. With the advent of genetic transformation techniques, it has become possible to clone and insert genes into the crop plants to confer resista...

Background: Lepidopteran and coleopteran species are the most important insect pests in maize. These pests can be controlled by the cultivation of genetically modified crops expressing insecticidal Bt-proteins. The long term success of this technology demands resistance management strategies to delay the evolution of resistance. The most efficient delay in resistance evolution can be expected i...

We constructed a reaction-diffusion model of the development of resistance to transgenic insecticidal Bt crops in pest populations. Kostitzin's demo-genetic model describes local interactions between three competing pest genotypes with alleles conferring resistance or susceptibility to transgenic plants, the spatial spread of insects being modelled by diffusion. This new approach makes it possi...

Several arthropod species are important vectors of pathogens that cause disease in hu‐ mans, animals, and plants, including protozoa, nematodes, bacteria, and viruses. Arthro‐ pods are also pests competing with humans for food and parasitize farm animals, decreasing their productivity. Historically, arthropod pests and disease vectors affecting public health, crop yields, and livestock producti...

There is growing public concern about pesticides’ non-target effects on humans and other organisms, and many pests have evolved resistance to some of the most commonly-used pesticides. Together, these factors have led to increasing interest in non-chemical, ecologicallysound ways to manage pests [1]. One pest-management alternative is the diversification of agricultural fields by establishing “...

There is increasing awareness all over the world of the economic significance of the vertebrate pests specially rodents. Their superiority in adopting themselves to almost all habitats and changing environmental conditions has made them man’s most dreaded enemy. Control of rodents is therefore of utmost importance. Rodenticides play a significant role in combating rodent pests. Non-palatability...

In today's world, food security is an important issue. Food shortages push prices up, impacting upon the health and well-being of hundreds of millions of rural poor across the globe. One way to increase food security is to decrease the amount of yield lost to pests. This encyclopedia provides a comprehensive overview of the fight against pests, covering chemical pesticides, biocontrol agents an...

Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) crystal protein genes encode insecticidal delta-endotoxins that are widely used for the development of insect-resistant crops. In this article, we describe an alternative transgenic strategy that has the potential to generate broader and more sustainable levels of resistance against insect pests. Our strategy involves engineering plants with a fusion protein combinin...

Management of insects that cause economic damage to yields of soybean mainly rely on insecticide applications. Sources of resistance in soybean plant introductions (PIs) to different insect pests have been reported, and some of these sources, like for the soybean aphid (SBA), have been used to develop resistant soybean cultivars. With the availability of SoySNP50K and the statistical power of g...

Widely grown transgenic crops producing insecticidal proteins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) can benefit agriculture, but adaptation by pests threatens their continued success. Refuges of host plants that do not make Bt toxins can promote survival of susceptible insects and delay evolution of resistance, particularly if resistance is inherited as a recessive trait. However, data have been lac...