LONDON, U.K. (Reuters) — A genetically modified wheat that gives off a special smell designed to repel aphids has flopped in field tests.
The work at Britain’s Rothamsted Research institute in southern England was the first test of a crop modified to release an anti-insect pheromone. It provoked protests from anti-GM activists who threatened, but failed, to rip up the plants.
The crop may have survived human attack, but it did not fare well against the aphids. Results from the five-year project published in the journal Scientific Reports showed that the GM wheat did not repel aphid pests in the field as hoped, despite initial success in laboratory tests.
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Aphids damage wheat by sucking sugar out of plants and spreading viruses, prompting extensive spraying with insecticides.
The Rothamsted team added genes to make the wheat produce the pheromone (E)-beta-farnesene, which is found naturally in other plants, in-cluding peppermint, and acts as an alarm call to aphids to disperse.
It is not clear why the GM crop failed to work as expected, but scientists said the aphids may have simply become attuned to the constant alarm signal, in the same way that people get used to a car alarm that never stops ringing.
One idea now being pursued is to make the plants produce “puffs” of pheromone when aphids arrive.
