Birth control for moths — that’s one way to describe the focus of a start-up company based at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa that hopes to take a bite out of the $100 billion hole insects inflict each year on worldwide crop production. Rusty Sutterlin, PhD, a chemist and entrepreneur, and his newly formed company, Sutterlin Technologies, is targeting the brown codling moth — a pest to farmers around the planet — using an environmentally friendly, patent-pending biodegradable technology licensed from UA. Scott Spear, PhD, a research scientist in UA’s Alabama Innovation and Mentoring of Entrepreners (AIME) program, and colleagues developed the technology.
Members of the company’s initial target market, apple growers, are primed and ready for relief from the winged insects, whose larva sometimes appears as worm-like creatures within apples. “The response I’m hearing indicates we can’t get this out soon enough,” Sutterlin says of his company’s powdery product, poised to enter field trials after successfully passing tests in UA laboratories. The product works by disrupting the insects’ mating patterns through the use of insect pheromones — chemical sex attractants that the tiny creatures emit to entice and locate mates. While using synthetic pheromones to reduce insect populations isn’t new, the standard means of delivering pheromones is quickly falling out of favor, Sutterlin says, because of environmental concerns and the labor-intensive steps necessary to use them.
The company’s biodegradable approach centers around the use of pectin — a complex carbohydrate that occurs naturally in fruits, including apples, and some vegetables. Used in jam production to provide the jelly-like consistency, pectin is adept at binding with the pheromones and later releasing them it as it degrades harmlessly in the fields. “We take the pectin and chemically modify it,” Sutterlin explains. “Then, we add the insect pheromone, mix it together, do a little chemistry and, voila, we’ve encapsulated the pheromone in pectin. If you’re holding it in your hand, it looks almost like flour.”
Growers can mix the powder with water and spray it on their fields using standard spraying equipment. As the pheromone is released, the insects are confused by the many scents that blanket the orchards and are unable to locate mates. “Growers are not going to see dead moths like they would with traditional insecticides,” Sutterlin says. Instead, “the mating season does not occur, so the next season, there are no bugs.” Unlike traditional insecticides, the technique doesn’t randomly kill harmless or commercially helpful insects and poses no environmental risks, he adds.
Source: UA News