Willow Jonathan, Cook Samantha M, Veromann Eve, Smagghe Guy
Chair of Plant Health, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Tartu, Estonia.
Laboratory of Agrozoology, Department of Plants and Crops, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2022 Apr 25;10:871651. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2022.871651. eCollection 2022.
Habitat loss and fragmentation, and the effects of pesticides, contribute to biodiversity losses and unsustainable food production. Given the United Nation's (UN's) declaration of this decade as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, we advocate combining conservation biocontrol-enhancing practices with the use of RNA interference (RNAi) pesticide technology, the latter demonstrating remarkable target-specificity double-stranded (ds)RNA's sequence-specific mode of action. This specificity makes dsRNA a biosafe candidate for integration into the global conservation initiative. Our interdisciplinary perspective conforms to the UN's declaration, and is facilitated by the Earth BioGenome Project, an effort valuable to RNAi development given its utility in providing whole-genome sequences, allowing identification of genetic targets in crop pests, and potentially relevant sequences in non-target organisms. Interdisciplinary studies bringing together biocontrol-enhancing techniques and RNAi are needed, and should be examined for various crop‒pest systems to address this global problem.
栖息地丧失和破碎化，以及农药的影响，导致生物多样性丧失和不可持续的粮食生产。鉴于联合国宣布本十年为联合国生态系统恢复十年，我们主张将增强生物防治的保护措施与RNA干扰（RNAi）农药技术的使用相结合，后者展示出显著的靶向特异性——双链（ds）RNA的序列特异性作用模式。这种特异性使dsRNA成为整合到全球保护倡议中的生物安全候选物。我们的跨学科观点符合联合国的宣言，并且由地球生物基因组计划推动，鉴于该计划在提供全基因组序列、允许识别作物害虫中的遗传靶标以及非靶标生物中潜在相关序列方面的效用，它对RNAi的发展很有价值。需要开展将增强生物防治技术和RNAi结合起来的跨学科研究，并应对各种作物-害虫系统进行研究，以解决这一全球性问题。
