Use of Peptides in the Pursuit of Novel Pest Control Agents

Abstract

Economic plant crops come under attack from a variety of natural enemies including fungi, insects and other plants. Development of chemical pesticides is expensive, and will become more restricted as environmental concerns are recognized. Natural products, specifically peptides and neuropeptides, offer vast potential for exploitation as leads to pest control agents. Benefits from research into biologically active peptides and related factors include the necessity to investigate and understand, in detail, the physiological context in which the peptide operates. In addition, research on peptide biosynthesis, mode of action, and catabolism reveals numerous biochemical steps which may prove to be targets for control agents. The variety of candidates for naturally-based control agent development is extensive, including microbial iron binding systems, fungal toxins, arthropod venom components, insect immune peptides, neuropeptides and others. In this symposium, these endogenous molecules are discussed with regard to the physiological processes they regulate and potential consequences of their manipulation, the need to explore leads to control agents in a wide variety of organisms, and the need to examine emerging technologies in an effort to bring laboratory successes to the field.Biologically active peptides convey, within their structures, information derived from the genes coding for the peptides and the genes coding for the processing enzymes which are essential to the biogenesis of mature peptides. Peptides may be considered, then, as informational biomolecules which deliver messages to target receptors, resulting in defined physiological responses. The This chapter not subject to U.S.