Whitefly, Bemisia tabaci, is one of the top 100 crop pests in the world, causing damage to plants and spreading plant diseases. This tiny insect – an adult whitefly measures just one millimetre in length – causes billions of dollars’ worth of damage to cassava, cotton, tomato and grain-legume crops, and threatens food security in the developing world.
The unlocking of the whitefly’s genome or genetic make-up resulted from the work of more than 50 scientists from the African Cassava Whitefly Project (ACWP), led by the Natural Resources Institute (NRI) of the UK-based University of Greenwich. The research project is funded since 2014 from grants by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
NRI’s Professor John Colvin who led the project explains that a genome is the genetic code that determines what an organism is. He says, “it is fundamental to understanding all sorts of biological relationships. It is the key to understanding an organism, in that it tells you about its relationships to other species, about biochemical pathways, whether or not it will be resistant to insecticides and so on.”
The unlocking of the whitefly genome is fundamental for food security
The consequences of unlocking the whitefly’s genome in terms of its importance to agriculture, food-production and humanity, is equivalent to the impact made on medicine when geneticists mapped out the human genome. The effects will be just as far-reaching for people who rely on cassava, one of the crops blighted by whitefly. Cassava producers are among the world’s economically poorest and cassava is important for their staple food, for income and for food security in times of drought and hardship.
The team of scientists say they have made a ground-breaking discovery – it was 20 years in the making – which is an unprecedented resource for tackling this pest and the plant-virus pandemics associated with it.
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