{"id":14275,"date":"2018-02-05T06:04:35","date_gmt":"2018-02-05T06:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/?p=14275"},"modified":"2020-05-27T06:14:11","modified_gmt":"2020-05-27T06:14:11","slug":"colorado-potato-beetle-genome-gives-insight-major-agricultural-pest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/colorado-potato-beetle-genome-gives-insight-major-agricultural-pest\/","title":{"rendered":"Colorado potato beetle genome gives insight into major agricultural pest"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Colorado potato beetle\u2019s rapid spread, hardiness, and recognizable tiger-like stripes have caught global attention since it began infesting potatoes in the 1800s. PHOTO: ZACH COHEN<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Colorado potato beetle is notorious for its role in starting the pesticide industry \u2014 and for its ability to resist the insecticides developed to stop it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Managing the beetle costs tens of millions of dollars every year, but this is a welcome alternative to the billions of dollars in damage it could cause if left unchecked.<\/span><\/p>\n

To better understand this tenacious pest, a team of scientists led by University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison entomologist\u00a0Sean Schoville<\/a>\u00a0sequenced the beetle\u2019s genome, probing its genes for clues to its surprising adaptability to new environments and insecticides. The new information sheds light on how this insect jumps to new plant hosts and handles toxins, and it will help researchers explore more ways to control the beetle.<\/span><\/p>\n

Schoville and colleagues from 33 other institutes and universities\u00a0report their findings<\/a>\u00a0in the Jan. 31, 2018 issue of Scientific Reports.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Colorado potato beetle\u2019s rapid spread, hardiness, and recognizable tiger-like stripes have caught global attention since it began infesting potatoes in the 1800s. The beetle was investigated as a potential agricultural weapon by Germany in the 1940s and its postwar spread into the Soviet bloc stoked an anti-American propaganda campaign to pin the invasion on outsiders. More benignly, it has been featured on many countries\u2019 stamps and is used in classrooms to educate about insect lifecycles.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Sean Schoville scouting for potato beetles in Wisconsin. COURTESY OF MOLECULAR ECOLOGY LAB<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But it\u2019s the beetle\u2019s ability to rapidly develop resistance to insecticides and to spread to climates previously thought inhospitable that has fascinated and frustrated entomologists for decades.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAll that effort of trying to develop new insecticides is just blown out of the water by a pest like this that can just very quickly overcome it,\u201d says Schoville. \u201cThat poses a challenge for potato growers and for the agricultural entomologists trying to manage it. And it\u2019s just fascinating from an evolutionary perspective.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Within the beetle\u2019s genome, Schoville\u2019s team found a diverse and large array of genes used for digesting plant proteins, helping the beetle thrive on its hosts. The beetle also had an expanded number of genes for sensing bitter tastes, likely because of their preference for the bitter nightshade family of plants, of which potatoes are a member.<\/span><\/p>\n

But when it came to the pest\u2019s infamous ability to overcome insecticides, the researchers were surprised to find that the Colorado potato beetle\u2019s genome looked much like those of its less-hardy cousins. The team did not find new resistance-related genes to explain the insect\u2019s tenaciousness.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSo this is what\u2019s interesting \u2014 it wasn\u2019t by diversifying their genome, adding new genes, that would explain rapid pesticide evolution,\u201d says Schoville. \u201cSo it leaves us with a whole bunch of new questions to pursue how that works.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Schoville and his collaborators see their research as a resource for the diverse group of scientists studying how to control the beetle as well as its life history and evolution.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat this genome will do is enable us to ask all sorts of new questions around insects, why they\u2019re pests and how they\u2019ve evolved,\u201d says Yolanda Chen, a professor at the University of Vermont and another leader of the beetle genome effort. \u201cAnd that\u2019s why we\u2019re excited about it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The genome did provide a clue to the beetle\u2019s known sensitivity to an alternative control system, known as RNA interference, or RNAi for short. The nucleic acid RNA translates the genetic instructions from DNA into proteins, and RNAi uses gene-specific strands of RNA to interfere with and degrade those messages. In the beetle, RNAi can be used to gum up its cellular machinery and act as a kind of insecticide. The Colorado potato beetle has an expanded RNAi processing pathway, meaning it could be particularly amenable to experimental RNAi control methods.<\/span><\/p>\n

Schoville and Chen are now sequencing another 100 genomes of the Colorado potato beetle and its close relatives to continue investigating the hardiness and adaptability that have captured so many people\u2019s attention for the past 150 years.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Colorado potato beetle is notorious for its role in starting the pesticide industry \u2014 and for its ability to resist the insecticides developed to stop it. Managing the beetle costs tens of millions of dollars every year, but this is a welcome alternative to the billions of dollars in damage it could cause if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":14276,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-agriculture","category-research"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581.jpeg",775,581,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581-150x150.jpeg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581-300x225.jpeg",300,225,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581-768x576.jpeg",750,563,true],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581.jpeg",750,562,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581.jpeg",775,581,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581.jpeg",775,581,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581.jpeg",775,581,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581.jpeg",760,570,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581.jpeg",600,450,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581.jpeg",600,450,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581.jpeg",654,490,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581.jpeg",480,360,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581.jpeg",87,65,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581.jpeg",640,480,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581.jpeg",96,72,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Beetle-4-775x581.jpeg",150,112,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Agriculture<\/a> Research<\/a>","tag_info":"Research","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}