..."The finding, reported today in Cell1, is the first known example of a natural gene transfer from a plant to an insect. It also explains one reason why the whitefly Bemisia tabaci is so adept at munching on crops: the gene that it swiped from plants enables it to neutralize a toxin that some plants produce to defend against insects....
...The diminutive whitefly — which is more closely related to aphids than to flies — wreaks agricultural havoc around the world. Bemisia tabaci is among the most destructive plant pests: whiteflies sup sugary sap from hundreds of types of plant, all the while excreting a sticky, sweet substance called honeydew that serves as a breeding ground for mould. Whiteflies are also vectors for more than 100 pathogenic plant viruses....
...That some species of whitefly could owe part of their predatory prowess to genes from other organisms is not entirely surprising, because genetic thievery is common in the arms race between plants and their pests. Over millions of years, plants and insects alike have borrowed heavily from microbial genomes, sometimes using their newly acquired genes to develop defensive or offensive strategies....
...To test the hypothesis, the team engineered tomato plants to produce a double-stranded RNA molecule capable of shutting down expression of the whitefly gene. Nearly all of the whiteflies that subsequently fed on these doctored tomato plants died.
That result suggests a new means of targeting whiteflies, says Jonathan Gershenzon, a chemical ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. “It offers an enormous chance to be specific,” he says. “You could keep the whiteflies away but not harm beneficial insects such as pollinators.”"....
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00782-w
First Known Gene Transfer from Plant to Insect Identified
Re: First known gene transfer from plant to insect identified
