A genetically specific pesticide has shown to be lethal to the destructive Colorado potato beetle while leaving all other tested species, even the beetle’s close relatives, unharmed.
Every year, this native of the Rocky Mountains causes $500 million or more in damages across the Northern Hemisphere—all across which it’s now found as an invasive species.
The company GreenLight Biosciences has developed a spray marketed as Calantha in the USA that uses RNA interference technology to target a gene called PSMB5 that codes for part of the cellular machinery that removes damaged proteins. If removed or inhibited, these dead or broken proteins build up and the larvae die within 6 days.
The potato beetle, which despite its name also damages eggplant, tomatoes, and bell peppers, has already developed immunity to 50 pesticide formulas.
Much like bacteria developing immunity to antibiotics, crop pests have gradually developed resistance or immunity to many kinds of pesticides, keeping pharma and agri-science companies forever at the drawing board figuring out how to combat different worms, beetles, and moths that ravage crops worldwide.
“They were chewing through treated plants like it was nothing,” Andrei Alyokhin, an entomologist at the University of Maine, told Science Magazine’s Erik Stokstad of the moment in 2001 when farmers in Maine noticed the then-new class of pesticides, neonicotinoids, were no longer effective.
RNA interference is considered the Holy Grail of this science, described as both way safer by researchers in the field, and innocuous to insects outside the potato beetle’s genetic relatives, including pollinators, lacewings, and ladybugs.
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“You can … hit the insect you want to kill with precision,” said Subba Reddy Palli, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky, also to Stokstad. “You cannot get anything better than this.”
Produced in large batches at around $1 per gram, Calantha was approved by the United States FDA for use after it was found to be harmless to non-target species. In safety trials, GreenLight checked bioinformatics databases to see how different the version of PSMB5 found in the potato beetle was from the same in other insects. Four closely related beetle species had similar copies of PSMB5, and of those four, two were affected.
These two were both agricultural pest species.
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The pesticide research community is so excited about Calantha that they are already devising strategies and precautions to prevent the potato beetle from developing immunity to it. GreenLight has also applied for FDA approval on a Calantha variant for the varroa mite, a plague species on honeybees, which can resist almost all available pesticides.
Environmental groups have demanded that lessons should be taken from past examples and that Calantha trials should be made to include many other species that share the habitat of a potato farm. Furthermore, the formula that keeps the RNA stable inside the spray is confidential, and having spent decades seeking compensation for glyphosate poisoning, they are unlikely to be easily satisfied, and neither should they be.
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