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...

Although climate change can cause extreme alterations to ecosystems, only limited research has investigated how altered physical conditions (e.g., warming, extreme temperature events, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and altered precipitation) influence species interactions. In particular, the interplay between host and parasites in such a changing world is in need of study. Our objective i...

 While occasional insect pests of cultivated sunflowers may be managed by conventional or reducedrisk insecticides, the cumulative costs and risks of relying on insecticides to suppress perennial or severe pests (common in North America) call for exploration of broader pest management strategies.  Recent research with the sunflower moth (Homoeosoma electellum [Pyralidae]) and banded sunflower...

Crop plants exhibit a wide diversity of defensive traits and strategies to protect themselves from damage by herbivorous pests and disease. These defensive traits may be naturally occurring or artificially selected through crop breeding, including introduction via genetic engineering. While these traits can have obvious and direct impacts on herbivorous pests, many have profound effects on high...

Tree species diversity generally has positive effects on forest primary productivity and resistance to natural perturbations, but diversity-function relationships can vary with site conditions. Recently, studies in experiments have shown that tree local climate, particular drought intensity, interactively affect insect herbivory. On the other hand, many focused response of forests terms growth ...

Transgenic cotton that produced one or more insecticidal proteins of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) was planted on over 15 million hectares in 11 countries in 2009 and has contributed to a reduction of over 140 million kilograms of insecticide active ingredient between 1996 and 2008. As a highly selective form of host plant resistance, Bt cotton effectively controls a number of key lepidopteran pe...

Host plant resistance assumes central role in pest management in order to increase production and productivity of the crops. Conventional breeding in conjunction with molecular techniques and transgenic approaches have a great promise to reduce pest associated crop losses, and accelerate the progress in developing cultivars with resistance to insects. Although, considerable progress has been ma...

Toxic plants have been used for years in agriculture to control major crop pests. However, the continuous exposure of targeted pests to toxins dramatically increases the rate of resistance evolution (Gassman et al. in Annu Rev Entomol 54:147-163, 2009a; Tabashnik et al. Nat Biotechnol 26:199-202, 2008). To prevent or delay resistance, non toxic host plants can be used as refuges. Our study cons...

Stem borers (Lepidoptera) are common cereal pests. In many parts of the world, species Ostrinia nubilalis and Sesamia nonagrioides stand out as important insect pests economically crops such maize. Their management relied mainly on transgenic host plant resistance over last 25 years. Technologies based insecticidal properties Bacillus thuringiensis-derived proteins allowed widespread pest popul...