The life of a plant that we depend on for food, clean air, and materials are challenged by myriad threats, natural and man-made including Viruses, pests, fungi, herbicides, drought, pollution, salinity, flooding, and frost. These rapid or unexpected emergence of these threats put human food security at risk and could lead to destabilization of the economy which depends a great deal on agriculture.
Yet, in this modern age of biological weapons, agriculture and agricultural products have been targeted by various nation states as viable strategic targets as well as targeted by terrorists (aka non-state actors) for acts of bioterrorism. Number of analysts have pointed out that terrorist attacks on livestock or crops, although unlikely to cause terror, are also a concern because they could be executed much more easily and could have serious economic consequences. National security can be quickly jeopardized by naturally occurring threats to the crop system, including pathogens, drought, flooding, and frost, but especially by threats introduced by state or non-state actors.
Farmers and others responsible for plant health use longstanding tools such as crop rotation, selective breeding, pesticides, slash-and-burn clearing, and quarantine to shelter plants and defend against the worst effects of pathogens, pests, and environmental insults, but these methods can be slow, inefficient, and damaging to the environment, and may require extensive and expensive infrastructure. And while scientists and farmers are increasingly turning to molecular techniques to improve resilience in plant varieties, today’s genomic tools generally do not allow for alteration of mature plants.
A new DARPA program is poised to provide an alternative to traditional agricultural threat response, using targeted gene therapy to protect mature plants within a single growing season. In the process, DARPA aims to transform certain insect pests into “Insect Allies,” the name of the new effort. DARPA proposes to leverage a natural and very efficient two-step delivery system to transfer modified genes to plants: insect vectors and the plant viruses they transmit.
“Insects eat plants and insects transmit the majority of plant viruses,” said Blake Bextine, the DARPA program manager for Insect Allies. “DARPA plans to harness the power of this natural system by engineering genes inside plant viruses that can be transmitted by insects to confer protective traits to the target plants they feed upon.”
The Insect Allies program is pursuing scalable, readily deployable, and generalizable countermeasures against potential natural and engineered threats to the food supply with the goals of preserving the U.S. crop system.
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