Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

The urge to combat climate change and the rapid degradation of agroecosystems
puts high pressure on the development of novel tools to make an applied and
theoretical change in the world. There is a vision on sustainability through Agenda
2030 which aligns with FAOs: the 10 elements of agroecology. Higher degrees of
cooperation and collaboration for data-sharing, open access and open information
could prove pivotal to solving some of said problems. Pest management is one
source of the degradation of biodiversity and decline in health of both workers and
the agroecosystems. Novel tools for the management of pests are necessary to
reduce the impact of these degradations as the current practices and methods are
unsustainable. Chemical ecology is a field of study which means to explore
alternatives to the current pest management practices and the development of novel
tools. Through the use of high-throughput systems it is possible to map
volatilomes and identify volatile organic compounds which attract certain insect
pests and make species specific lures to be utilised in novel tools for management
of insect pests. One such pest is Delia antiqua, the onion fly. Through GC-MS and
GC-EAD a set of certain sulphuric compounds in yellow onion could be identified
that elicited strong electrophysiological responses in D. antiqua. Meanwhile, did
Drosophila melanogaster show no response to sulphuric compounds, indicating
niche-driven or phylogenetic olfactory divergence between the species. Further,
the analyses of olfactory responses utilised existing open- and closed-access
databases and R packages, which underlines the importance of collaboration in
developing and utilising such tools to accelerate the read from research to impact.
To develop species specific lure-traps more comparative research is needed across
various insect species as well as host crops and it has to be done in a transparent
and cooperative nature.