Abstract
Aphids are important agricultural pests causing major yield losses worldwide. Since aphids can rapidly develop resistance to chemical insecticides there is an urgent need to find alternative aphid pest management strategies. Despite the economic importance of bluegreen aphid (Acyrthosiphon kondoi), very few genetic resources are available to expand our current understanding and help find viable control solutions. An artificial diet is a desirable non-invasive tool to enable the functional characterisation of genes in bluegreen aphid and discover candidate target genes for future use in RNA interference (RNAi) mediated crop protection against aphids. To date no artificial diet has been developed for bluegreen aphid, so we set out to develop a suitable diet by testing and optimising existing diets. Here, we describe an artificial diet for rearing bluegreen aphid and also provide a proof of concept for the supplementation of the diet with RNAi molecules targeting the salivary gland transcript C002 and gap gene hunchback, resulting in bluegreen aphid mortality which has not yet been documented in this species. Managing this pest, for example via RNAi delivery through artificial feeding will be a major improvement to test bluegreen aphid candidate target genes for future pest control and gain significant insights into bluegreen aphid gene function.
Highlights
Aphids are important agricultural pests causing major yield losses worldwide
To provide a proof of concept that this diet when combined with RNA interference (RNAi) strategies can be used as an effective reverse genetics approach, we looked for target genes that were previously reported to be lethal to A. pisum, a close relative of the same genus to bluegreen aphid, when knocked down via RNAi
We focused on two pea aphid targets, the salivary gland transcript C002 and the gap gene hunchback Aphbd, which resulted in aphid mortality when knocked down by injected targeted small interfering RNA (siRNA) or feeding-based dsRNA, respectively[20,23]
Summary
Aphids are important agricultural pests causing major yield losses worldwide. Since aphids can rapidly develop resistance to chemical insecticides there is an urgent need to find alternative aphid pest management strategies. To gain an understanding how well the aphids perform on an artificial diet compared to natural feeding on planta, we included three M. truncatula lines (A20, Cyprus and Borung), all susceptible to bluegreen aphid and scored the aphid survival rates and nymph count after six days of feeding (Fig. 2B).
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