Genetic Control of Insect Pest Species – Achievements, Challenges, and Perspectives

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Background

Insect pest species cause billions of dollars of losses in agriculture and livestock, and hundreds of millions of disease cases every year due to the transmission of pathogens and parasites. Insecticides-based applications currently are the most widespread strategy to combat insect pests and disease vectors. The increasing resistance development against the main substance classes which is being observed worldwide and across many different species, together with the negative impact of insecticides on human health, non-target species and the environment are of major concern during the last years. In contrast to insecticide applications, genetic control (GC), which is a form of biological control, has been suggested as an alternative to manage insect pest populations in a species-specific manner. A most well-known and proven GC method is the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT), which entails the continuous mass-release of irradiation-sterilized males of a given species to produce infertile matings in the field, leading to the decline of the target population over time. An unprecedented number of promising GC programs are currently being pursued to develop SIT or other GC strategies, including transgenic- symbiont- and gene drive-based methods or a combination thereof, to control populations of major insect pest species by decreasing their reproductive capacity. Modern genetic technologies are also used to tackle disease transmission by creating disease refractoriness in insect vector species and subsequently driving this trait into the wild populations.

Despite the challenges, promising advances have been made in the past decade in the development of genetic control strategies against various insect pest and disease vector species, and a small number of systems have progressed towards the application stage. Most GC approaches are at the developmental stage, while some are at the validation or even at the implementation stage. Others, however, are facing biological or technical hurdles.
A critical step for many GC strategies is the removal of females prior to mass-release for several reasons: First, co-released females inhibit the dispersal and mating rate of released males with wild females; second, mass-rearing of the females significantly increases the production costs. Third, females can still damage fruits (agricultural pests) or contribute to disease transmission and nuisance biting (vector species). The development of an early, cost-effective and mass-rearing scalable female removal system has become a bottleneck for many species, especially vector insects. Other key aspects to successful GC are the development of mass-rearing protocols or effective sterilization procedures for the target species as well as the production and release of insects of high biological quality and performance. These issues are being tackled using traditional methods as well as modern genetic and transgenic approaches but will need various levels of optimization and new developments to bring GC to the application stage for a broad range of important pest species. Additionally, many of the approaches are facing challenges regarding regulatory aspects and public acceptance, especially in the case of transgenic and gene drive strategies.

Research articles, reviews and opinions on the following topics are welcome in this project:
• New developments on important aspects of GC, including but not limited to: mass-rearing, sexing, sterilization, marking, release, and monitoring
• Current and potential future GC strategies based on but not limited to the following approaches and technologies: SIT, IIT, SIT-IIT, population replacement, population repression, transgenic approaches, CRISPR/Cas genome editing or any other technology
• Efforts to tackle new pest insect species by the transfer of successful technologies or the development of novel strategies
• Efforts to improve existing technologies or strains, or to further optimize existing promising approaches
• Advances in rearing and mass rearing of new target species
• Development and advances of gene drive systems to suppress disease transmission in vector insect populations
• Current limitations of existing GC systems in terms of biological or technical hurdles
• Perspectives of GC, including gene drive systems, with regard to their potential role in successfully and sustainably controlling pest insects and disease transmission (locally or worldwide)
• Identifying and removing non-technical barriers to successful implementation of pest-control products for GC, such as regulations or poor public acceptance
• Integration of the GC products with existing control methods
• Risk assessments and regulatory decision-making about GC pest-control products

Keywords: Gene drive, sterile insect technique, GMO field releases, agricultural and livestock pests, human disease vectors

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