Every summer resident knows that the main enemy of potatoes is the Colorado potato beetle, which eats the tops of this crop with gusto.
To protect the harvest, says Anastasia Kovrizhnykh, an expert of the online publication BelNovosti, agronomist and landscape designer, some gardeners spend almost all their time in the beds, trying to collect beetles and remove larvae from the leaves. Others prefer to fight pests with chemicals, but these products often prove ineffective.
Scientists have attempted to uncover the reasons for the Colorado potato beetle's resistance to insecticides.
To do this, they sequenced the pest's genome. As a result, it was concluded that beetles living in different regions showed resistance to different types of insecticides, and the insects' genes quickly mutated, acquiring resistance to new chemicals.
This is due to the fact that Colorado beetles were among the first to be controlled chemically.
In this regard, it can be assumed that the effectiveness of insecticides that will be developed in the future will be low.
However, the researchers do not intend to give up: genomic experiments will continue to develop other strategies for combating the parasite that lives in potato beds.
It is possible that scientists will have to use gene editing to control the beetle's activity.
