TRAPPING ROACHES WITH BIOCHEMISTRY

Abstract

THE CHEMICAL THAT MAKES a common household cockroach irresistible to her suitors may soon be used to create a new type of poisoned bait trap that can be used to kill nests of those same smitten insects. A group led by Wendell L. Roelofs, a professor of insect biochemistry at Cornell University, has deduced the structure of the sex pheromone that the female German cockroach, Blattella germanica , uses to attract potential mates { Science , 307 , 1104 (2005)}. The simple 12-carbon pheromone—dubbed blattellaquinone by Roelofs and colleagues—has eluded natural products chemists for decades, according to Coby Schal, one of the report's coauthors and an entomologist at North Carolina State University Entomologists didn't even realize it existed until 1993. Before then, they assumed that B. germanica didn't need a volatile sex pheromone because the cockroaches live in close quarters where males could easily find females, Schal says. Getting enough of the pheromone to pin down its structure also ...