Gut bacteria ally with Bt
Particular microbes make caterpillars susceptible to the insecticide
Caterpillars shouldn’t always trust their guts. A new study reports that stomach microbes can betray their pest hosts, conspiring with Bt toxin to kill the lepidopteran larvae.
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The findings, released online March 3 in BMC Biology, reveal “a new realm of exciting interactions that we didn’t anticipate,” comments entomologist Bruce Tabashnik of the University of Arizona in Tucson.
A greater understanding of the interactions among the toxin, the pests it kills and their gut microbes may lead to designer pest control regimes, Tabashnik says. “Bt proteins are a great tool for pest control because they are so specific,” he says. “If we know more about the insects, we can be even wiser about how we use them [Bt proteins].”