Bioactivity of Cereal- and Legume-Based Macaroni Pasta Volatiles to Adult (L.).

The attractiveness of ten commercially available Italian macaroni pastas made from different cereals [; (whole wheat); ; mixture of five cereals; ; ] or legumes (; ; ; ) to , was compared. adults were more attracted to cereal pastas than legume pastas, but the differences in attractiveness were not always significant. Consistent with the results of behavioural bioassays, the mortality of adults over 20 days exposed to pasta samples was 100% with the legume pasta samples and only 8% with the pasta. GC-MS analysis of HS-SPME extracts from the different pasta samples highlighted marked qualitative and quantitative differences, with aliphatic aldehydes and aliphatic alcohols being the most abundant volatile components of cereal- and legume-pastas, respectively. In two-choice behavioural bioassays, insect attraction to a 1:1 combination of and pastas (80%) was even higher than that observed in pasta alone (64%) and in pasta alone (20%). This strongly suggested that the low attractiveness of legume pasta is mainly due to the lack of attractant stimuli rather than emission of repellent compounds.