Genetic discovery advances insect pest control worldwide
Genetic discovery advances insect pest control worldwide
Tags: North America, Pest management, Sterile insect technique (SIT)IAEA, Phys.org, 2025.
An international research team led by Justus Liebig University Giessen (JLU) and the Joint FAO/IAEA Center of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture has identified the gene responsible for a temperature-sensitive lethality (tsl) phenotype in the Mediterranean fruit fly, solving a long-standing mystery. Their research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The sterile insect technique (SIT) involves the mass-rearing and sterilization using radiation of a target pest. Sterile males are then released over defined areas, where they mate with wild females, producing no offspring, which reduces the pest population.
The SIT dates back to 1916, when scientists first used X-rays to induce sterility in insects. It was successfully implemented in the 1950s against the New World screwworm in the United States of America. Since then, SIT has become a globally recognized and target-specific method to suppress invasive and established insect populations of agriculture, veterinary and medical importance. The effectiveness and efficiency of SIT depends on reliably separating the sexes so that only sterile males are released in the field. A breakthrough came in the late 1980s with the discovery of the tsl mutation at the Joint FAO/IAEA Center’s Insect Pest Control Laboratory. This was followed by the development of tsl-based genetic sexing in Ceratitis capitata, in which female offspring die at the embryonic stage following short-term heat treatment. This made it possible to produce sterile male flies at an industrial scale. Yet the gene underlying this effect remained unidentified for more than three decades, limiting the broader application of this approach to other insect species.
