The activation of the abscisic acid (ABA) signaling pathway reduces water loss from plants challenged by drought stress. The effect of drought-induced ABA signaling on the defense and nutrition allocation of plants is largely unknown. We postulated that these changes can affect herbivorous insects. We studied the effects of drought on different feeding stages of pea aphids in the wild-type A17 ...

Herbivore-induced plant volatiles (HIPVs) play a key role in the interactions between plants and herbivorous insects, as HIPVs can promote or deter insects’ behavior. While aphids are common serious phloem-feeding pests farmland ecosystems, little is known about how use their sensitive olfactory system to detect HIPVs. In this study, antennal transcriptomes of aphid species Megoura crassicauda ...

Although the hemipterans (Aphididae) are comprised of roughly 50,000 extant insect species, only four have sequenced genomes that are publically available, namely Acyrthosiphon pisum (pea aphid), Rhodnius prolixus (Kissing bug), Myzus persicae (Green peach aphid) and Diuraphis noxia (Russian wheat aphid). As a significant proportion of agricultural pests are phloem feeding aphids, it is crucial...

Neuropeptide F (NPF) signaling systems are widespread and highly evolutionarily conserved from vertebrates to invertebrates. In fact, NPF has been identified in many insect species and plays regulatory roles in diverse physiological processes, such as feeding, learning, reproduction and stress responses. NPF operates by interacting with the NPF receptor (NPFR). Here, we characterized and determ...

Plant pathogens can induce symptoms that affect the performance of insect herbivores utilizing the same host plant. Previous studies examining the effects of infection of tic bean, Vicia faba L. (Fabales: Fabaceae), by pea enation mosaic virus (PEMV), an important disease of legume crops, indicated there were no changes in the growth and reproductive rate of its primary vector the pea aphid, Ac...

Resource consumption often increases with greater consumer biodiversity. This could result either from complementarity among consumers or the inclusion of particular key species, and it is often difficult to differentiate between these two mechanisms. We exploited a simple plant mutation (reduced production of surface waxes) to alter foraging within a community of aphid predators, and thus perh...

Pea aphid, Acyrthosiphon pisum , is a serious pest of many different leguminous plants, and it mainly relies on its odorant receptors (Ors) to discriminate among host species. However, less known about the role that Ors play in plant location. In this study, we identified novel conserved receptor clade by phylogenetic analysis, conducted functional analysis ApisOr23 A. . The results showed homo...