Plant Molecule Discovered To Indirectly Cause Cannibalism in the Beet Armyworm: Major Potential as Green Chemistry Pesticide

Many plants have been documented as having self defense mechanisms and means of communicating with other plants through signaling molecules spread through the air.

One striking example of this you might have learned about in university biology is the way that many plants attract wasps to eat pests by releasing (Z)-3-hexenol. [1]

There are so many of these signaling molecules that researchers and analytical chemists will have their hands full for quite some time trying to identify them all.

Recently, a group of researchers decided to quantify the protective effect of one such molecule called methyl jasmonate and document the behavior of one common pest, Spodoptera exigua, on tomato plants.

What they discovered was that met-jasmonate reduced the worms’ ability to eat tomato leaves when applied before hand and, in addition, lead the normally herbivorous worms to cannibalize each other. Whether applied at the highest or lowest dosage tested (a spray of 0.1 to 10.0 millimolar met-jasmonate) ~90% of the pest species were cannibalized.

This could lead to methyl jasmonate, or more likely a patentable analog molecule, becoming a desperately needed addition to the arsenal of green chemistry pesticides.

[To the authors of the study, John Orrock, Brian Connolly and Anthony Kitchen, there’s one thing I would have added to polish off the paper, a methyl jasmonate mass per tomato biomass dosage approximation. Listing the dosages you sprayed in mM just doesn’t tell me how much interacted with the plants. Given the opportunity to repeat the experiment, I would apply the liquid using a soft paint brush, then use the weight difference, pre and post, brushing to calculate the volume used, assuming evaporation is negligible.]

Notes:
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17786223
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0231-6
*Wasp image by Alvesgaspar

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