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Main | Local food? »  Evolution-proof pest-resistant crops?
This week's paper is "Alarm pheromone habituation in Myzus
persicae has ﬁtness consequences and causes extensive gene
expression changes", published in PNAS by Martin de Vos and
others.  Aphids suck. This wouldn't be too big a problem for
their host plants, except that they sometimes transmit viruses.
Some plants repel these pests by giving off gases very similar
to the chemical alarm signals aphids release when attacked by
predators. Could crops be genetically engineered to do this?
Probably, but would it work, or would the aphids evolve to
ignore these signals and keep on sucking?  To answer this
question, the authors studied aphids on plants genetically
engineered to make aphid alarm signal.  The first generation of
aphids on the false-alarm plants were often repelled by them,
and also reproduced less. Maybe they were feeling stressed. But
the second and third generations were about 50