“Our team established, for the first time, genetic approaches to controlling glassy-winged sharpshooters,” Peter Atkinson, an entomologist at UC Riverside and the study’s co-author, said in a press release
In 1882, there was an epidemic sweeping vineyards in the Los Angeles Basin of California. Named after, it was known as a mysterious plant disease that turned green leaves brown, shriveled grapes, and killed a grapevine within three years. It would take about a century for scientists to figure out what was causing the disease—a bacteria named—and who was spreading it: a leaf hopping insect called the glassy-winged sharpshooter.
and make Xyella infections intractable. But there is one glimmer of hope on the horizon—and it involves hacking the glassy-winged sharpshooter’s DNA., researchers at the University of California Riverside managed to successfully use the gene-editing tool CRISPR to change the eye color of the insect, an alteration that was passed on to its progeny.
“This is a great technology because it can be so specific to one insect, and not cause off-target effects on other insects, animals or humans,” Inaiara de Souza Pacheco, an entomologist at UC Riverside and lead study author, said in the press release. “It’s a much more environmentally friendly strategy for insect control than using chemicals.”
“It’s absolutely amazing because the success rate in other organisms is often 30 percent or lower,” Linda Walling, a plant biologist at UC Riverside and study co-author, said in the press release. “The high rate of gene editing success in glassy-winged sharpshooters bodes well for our ability to develop new methods of insect control, as well as understanding the basic biology of this devastating pest.
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