Malaga lemons and grapefruit are in good phytosanitary condition

These substances, in sufficient concentration, confuse male insects and delay or prevent them from finding females.

A team from CSIC and the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) has developed, at laboratory level, genetically modified plants capable of producing and releasing insect sex pheromones to deal with pests affecting herbaceous and similar plants, thus reducing the use of pesticides. In their study, the researchers worked with Nicotiana benthamiana as a model plant, which they genetically modified to encode volatile compounds such as moth pheromones, thus turning them into pheromone biofactories.

"Plant-based bioproduction of insect sex pheromones is an innovative and sustainable strategy for pest control in agriculture. We have developed transgenic plants that produce two volatile compounds present in many lepidopteran sex pheromone mixtures. But, in addition to producing them, they can release them into the atmosphere, which means that in the future they could be used in pest control techniques such as sexual confusion in the males of the pest or strategies such as 'push and pull'", explains Diego Orzáez, researcher.

Sexual confusion occurs when in the atmosphere there is such a concentration of these volatiles that the males of the pest have difficulty finding the females that emit the pheromone to attract them. This prevents or delays copulation and reproduction of the species, which results in a gradual reduction of the population and, therefore, in greater control of the pest, says Vicente Navarro, researcher. Until now, these pheromones were obtained by chemical synthesis and released into the environment by means of biodispensers.