Olfactomics: accelerating innovation in sustainable insect pest control in a post-insecticide era

Agriculture urgently needs a sustainability overhaul to curb the rapid decline in global biodiversity. For this we urgently need innovations that secure food production while minimizing harmful impacts.

Replacing insecticides is a key, but sustainable alternatives are too few and developed too slowly.We will develop a platform that can accelerate novel insect control tools that are based on odors and suppresses pest species, while leaving others unharmed.

Using uniform procedures, a researcher can type a species’ olfactory responses, uploaded these, and perform comparative analyses with other species in the database.

Besides providing important evolutionary-ecological correlates, the convergence and divergence in responses provide strong leads for the development of attractants, a proof-of-principle of which was recently published.Using this platform, we will type seven Scandinavian fly pests, upload their ‘olfactomes’ and extract candidate attractants.

Synthetic blends will be tested in the laboratory and the field together with stakeholders.

Besides these direct deliverables on these pest species, the research will also mark the start of a much broader and global olfactomics effort, and has every potential to become an important bridge to understand insect olfaction from genes to behavior and fasttrack research to application.