The Pesticide Toxicology and Pest Resistance team has made new progress in the field of pest resistance

Nanhu News Network News (Correspondent Cai Tingwei) Recently, the research results of the pesticide toxicology and pest resistance team of the College of Plant Science and Technology of our university are based on "Microbiome variation correlates with the insecticide susceptibility in different geographic strains of a significant agricultural.
" pest, Nilaparvata lugens" was published
in NPJ Biofilms and Microbiomes.

The concept of "pest resistance microbiome" was proposed, which revealed the relationship between microbial abundance and diversity and pesticide sensitivity in different field populations of brown planthopper, included the pest microbiome in the scope of pest resistance monitoring, and identified important microbial markers of brown planthopper resistance, which deepened the understanding of pest resistance and provided new strategies and targets for the implementation of "target fungus pest control" strategy, pest resistance management and new drug creation
.

Microbiome variation driven by abiotic environmental factors shapes the detoxification gene expression pattern of brown planthoppers, which in turn affects host insecticide resistance variation

Based on the major needs of green, high-quality and safe rice production in China, the research team carried out a series of studies
on the resistance of brown planthopper, an important rice pest.
Systematic monitoring of planthopper resistance has been carried out for ten consecutive years, accumulating valuable basic resistance data and resistance resources.
Previous studies revealed the molecular mechanism by which Wolbachia, a commensal bacterium of brown planthopper, regulates the detoxification and metabolism of brown planthopper (Zhang et al.
, 2021).

However, it is unclear
how insect microbiome diversity shapes insecticide resistance in brown planthoppers in complex field environments.
Based on this, this study proposed the concept of "resistance microbiome" by extensively comparing the microbiome composition, transcript expression level and sensitivity to different insecticides of multiple brown planthopper field and laboratory populations, and found that the abundance of core bacterial symbionts of brown planthopper was significantly correlated with the expression of detoxification genes related to host resistance.
It was determined that the microbiome diversity of the field population of Brown planthopper, driven by abiotic environmental factors, shaped the gene expression pattern of host detoxification enzyme, which in turn led to the variation
of pesticide resistance in different field populations.

This study identified a variety of brown planthopper core commensal fungi as "Biomarker" for their resistance level, which provided strong support for the development of rapid monitoring technology for field resistance level in the future, and provided a new perspective
for the development of field pest resistance to insecticide resistance and the formulation of treatment strategies under the background of climate change.

Dr.
Yunhua Zhang, a graduate of the College of Plant Science and Technology, and Tingwei Cai, a doctoral student, are the co-first authors of the paper, Professor Wan Hu is the corresponding author of the paper, and Professor Li Jianhong, Associate Professor He Shun and Assistant Professor Adam C.
N.
Wong of the University of Florida participated in the guidance of the research, which was supported
by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the National Key Research and Development Program of China.

Reviewed by: Li Jianhong

【English Abstract】

Microbiome-mediated insecticide resistance is an emerging phenomenon found in insect pests.
However, microbiome composition can vary by host genotype and environmental factors, but how these variations may be associated with insecticide resistance phenotype remains unclear.
In this study, we compared different field and laboratory strains of the brown planthopper Nilaparvata lugens in their microbiome composition, transcriptome, and insecticide resistance profiles to identify possible patterns of correlation.
Our analysis reveals that the abundances of core bacterial symbionts are significantly correlated with the expression of several host detoxifying genes (especially NlCYP6ER1, a key gene previously shown involved in insecticides resistance).
The expression levels of these detoxifying genes correlated with N.
lugens insecticide susceptibility.
Furthermore, we have identified several environmental abiotic factors, including temperature, precipitation, latitude, and longitude, as potential predictors of symbiont abundances associated with expression of key detoxifying genes, and correlated with insecticide susceptibility levels of N.
lugens.
These findings provide new insights into how microbiome-environment-host interactions may influence insecticide susceptibility, which will be helpful in guiding targeted microbial-based strategies for insecticide resistance management in the field.

Link to the paper: