Fungus could be the insecticide of the future
摘要
木材害虫如树皮甲虫常对树木造成严重破坏，传统防治依赖有毒杀虫剂。研究发现，某些菌株（如白僵菌）能够突破甲虫借由酚类化合物增强的抗菌防御，成功感染并杀死这些害虫，为未来害虫防治提供了潜在的真菌杀虫剂方案。
Exterminators keep getting calls for a reason. Wood-devouring insects, such as beetles, termites, and carpenter ants, are constantly chewing through walls or infecting trees and breaking them down. The fight against these insects usually involved noxious insecticides; but now, at least some of them can be eliminated using a certain species of fungus.
Infestations of bark beetles are the bane of spruce trees. Eurasian spruce bark beetles (Ips typographus) ingest bark high in phenolic compounds, organic molecules that often act as antioxidants and antimicrobials. They protect spruce bark from pathogenic fungi—and the beetles take advantage. Their bodies boost the antimicrobial power of these compounds by turning them into substances that are even more toxic to fungi. This would seem to make the beetles invulnerable to fungi.
There is a way to get past the beetles’ borrowed defenses, though. Led by biochemist Ruo Sun, a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, found that some strains of the fungus Beauveria bassiana are capable of infecting and killing the pests.
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