The prestigious scientific journal Cell on Thursday published a cover article online written by Chinese scientists about the agricultural pest whitefly, or Bemisia tabaci.

　　Zhang Youjun, director-general of the Institute of Vegetables of Flowers at Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and his team have discovered that the tiny pests are prone to transfer genes from host plants and thus lead to a broad host plant adaptation in insects.

　　The whitefly steals the "spear" of the host plant, and uses it to break the "shield" of the plant, which enables it to harm more than 600 plant varieties including cotton and vegetables, said Zhang, who has researched the subject for 20 years.

　　The whiteflies are one of the most dangerous pests in agricultural crops and ornamental plants, especially harmful to plants in greenhouses, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.

　　These findings reveal an evolutionary scenario whereby herbivores harness the genetic toolkit of their host plants to develop resistance to plant defenses and how this can be used for crop protection. Interfering with transferred genes can be a highly effective way to combat pests, the article said.

　　"Mining for other functional horizontal transfer genes from host plants into insect pests should yield other key genes that can be excellent targets for the promising RNAi-based insect pest control strategy," it added.

　　Dr. Roy Kirsch at Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology which located on Beutenberg Campus in Germany is one of the three reviewers of the article.

　　"The main power of the study is that the research question is addressed from many different angles by drawing a bow from comprehensive metabolic profiling of the plant to comparative genomics of the insect and a bit of everything in between," he said.

　　Titled Whitefly Hijacks a Plant Detoxification Gene that Neutralizes Plant Toxins, the article will be officially published on April 1, marking the first Cell article with Chinese-led writing in agricultural pest research, according to the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

　　Read the paper via

　　https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)00164-1