The ferns in your garden contain proteins that may soon help fight pests. This “ancient group of plants wards off hungry insects better than other flora,” and their “proteins kill and deter pests,” including “bugs resistant to widely used natural pesticides,” reports Science. A newly discovered protein
adds to a growing arsenal that could one day provide a fresh alternative to chemical insecticides. “These proteins have great potential and may represent a new mode of pesticide action,” says Juan Luis Jurat-Fuentes, an entomologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They are exciting, says Kristina Sepčić, a biochemist at the University of Ljubljana, because they “have proven to be active against insect [populations] resistant to certain bacterial toxins.”
Since the late 1930s, proteins isolated from a soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringensis (Bt) have become a mainstay of natural pest control. They were first used as an insecticidal spray, but more recently scientists engineered genes for these proteins into crops. Farmers around the world planted more than 100 million hectares of these transgenic plants in 2019.
Transgenic corn and cotton alone saved growers more than $50 billion in lost crops in the first 2 decades of their use, according to Corteva Agriscience. Bt pest control also brought environmental benefits, reducing the use of organophosphate insecticides and other toxic chemicals.
But it may not be working as well as it used to. When Bruce Tabashnik, an entomologist at the University of Arizona, reviewed 25 years of data on corn, sugarcane, cotton, soybeans, and other Bt crops from seven countries, he found signs that populations of 11 pest species have evolved substantial resistance to the proteins. Cases of resistance jumped from three in 2005 to 26 in 2020….That trend is continuing.
Indeed, there are now 17 additional instances where pests have become resistant. “This is of great concern,” says La Trobe University researcher Marilyn Anderson. “We do not want to return to heavy use of chemical insecticides.” She and other scientists are now looking at fern proteins as an alternative.
In the wild, these ancient plants, which evolved long before the plants now used as crops, often seem unaffected by insects.
In the 1990s, researchers sprayed crops with fern extracts, with mixed results. Otherwise, ferns and other non–seed producing plants got little attention as possible insect killers. Then, in 2016, researchers from India inserted a gene from a halberd fern (genus Tectaria) into cotton, hoping to fight sap-sucking whiteflies. Because no other natural insecticides had ever worked against this pest, says P.K. Singh, a plant biotechnologist at the CSIR-National Botanical Research Institute, “We thought to explore nonobvious and unrelated sources for insecticidal activity.”The halberd fern gene protected the cotton from whiteflies and other sucking pests, and Singh has now isolated other fern compounds that deter chewing insects, such as caterpillars. He says his team has engineered the corresponding genes into cotton and seen very “interesting” and “promising” results in field studies.
In other news, a mutant tomato could save tomato harvests from a common blight. And a plant virus may be used to protect plants from root-eating nematodes.
Scientists recently engineered bionic silkworms that spin fibers six times stronger than Kevlar.
Artificial intelligence is now developing highly-effective antibodies to fight disease. Doctors overseas are using artificial intelligence to detect cases of breast cancer more effectively.
A new ultrasound therapy could help treat cancer and Alzheimer’s disease and skull implants could fight depression.
Artificial wombs could be coming soon, to prevent premature babies from dying or being permanently disabled due to premature life outside the womb. Doctors are already beginning to do womb transplants. A woman who was previously unable to have children recently received her sister’s womb in the first womb transplant in the United Kingdom.
