Sap-sucking insects are important pests in agriculture and good models to study insect biology. The role of ecdysone pathway genes in the life history of this group of insects is largely unknown likely due to a lack of efficient gene silencing methods allowing functional genetic analyses. Here, we developed a new and high throughput method to silence whitefly genes using a leaf-mediated dsRNA f...

The coconut palm, Cocos nucifera L. (Arecales: Arecaceae), is currently grown extensively throughout the intertropical zones of the world, including Brazil, where it constitutes an important source of income for growers. Although whiteflies are not normally considered coconut pests, these insects can damage crops directly by sucking the sap, which weakens the plant; indirect damage may be cause...

The impact of nitrogen fertilization on cotton plants, Gossypium hirsutum L., silverleaf whitefly, Bemisia argentifolii Bellows & Perring, population dynamics and honeydew production were investigated in the field at Riverside, California, USA. Treatments were soil applications of 0, 112, 168 and 224 kg nitrogen per hectare, and a soil application of 112 kg of nitrogen plus a foliar application...

An accurate and simple evaluation method is crucial for identifying whitefly resistance in tomato breeding. We developed an in vitro method for evaluating resistance of tomato leaves and tested this on wild and cultivated tomato varieties. We found that young leaves observed for whitefly oviposition after 8 hours provided appropriate comparative conditions. This method effectively distinguished...

The mechanism underlying the mediation of behavior and fitness non-vector herbivores by fungal pathogen-infected host plants is still unclear. In this study, we experimentally assessed effects tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum L.) plant infection status on using powdery mildew disease fungus (Oidium lycopersici) greenhouse whitefly Trialeurodes vaporariorum as a model multitrophic plant-pathogen,...

counting the population of insect pests is a key task for planning a successful integrated pest management program. most image processing and machine vision techniques in the literature are very site-specific and cannot be easily re-usable because their performances are highly related to their ground truth data. in this article a new unsupervised image processing method is proposed which is gen...

A major component of the evaluation of biological control agents is the study and comparison of their biology, including the reproductive mode. In hymenopteran parasitoids, reproductive modes include thelytoky and arrhenotoky. Since a thelytokous population produces only females, it is assumed that they may be better suited for biological control than an arrhenotokous population. Here we compar...