Genetic Pesticides Could Target Individual Species
Western corn rootworm beetle USDA When farmers want to kill crop pests or weeds now, they often spray their fields with something that can be deadly to a host of animals or plants. But what if they could target individual species, such as corn rootworm? New research, harnessing a Nobel-Prize winning discovery to silence genes, hopes to create such products. "If you use a neuro-poison, it kills everything," Subba Reddy Palli, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky who is researching the technology, which is called RNA interference, told the New York Times. "But this one is very target-specific." The technique, called RNA interference or RNAi, works by creating snippets of RNA that correspond to genes in the target species, say corn rootworm. When these chunks of genetic material enter the rootworm, perhaps after being sprayed onto the crop, the animal reacts to this RNA snippet as it would...