New Horizons in Insect Science Towards Sustainable Pest Management

Role of RNA Interference in Pest Management 201

RNAi in Insect Pest Management

Most of the studies on RNAi in entomology
were on establishing the function of genes that
are involved in various metabolic processes
(Kramer & Bentley 2003 ; Fabrick et al. 2004 ;
Dong and Friedrich 2005 ; Amico & Nijhout
2006 ; Arakane et al. 2006 ; Collinge et al. 2006 ;
Lagos et al. 2006; Mutti et al. 2006 ). But many
researchers envisaged the potential of RNAi for
field level insect pest management, but success

was not forthcoming due to many reasons like

poor understanding on the mechanism of RNAi

in different orders of insects, amplification and

systemic spread of the silencing signal in the

treated insects, amenability of different orders of

insects for the RNAi approach, etc. In the year

1998 an experimental proof that introduction of

dsRNA into the cell evoked RNAi mechanism

in the free living nematode, C. elegans Maupas

(Fire et al. 1998 ) opened a new exciting area of

RNAi in various spheres of research including

Fig. 2 Variation in theme of RNAi mechanism in various organisms. (Gordon and Waterhouse 2007 )