Abstract
(Sub-project to 838.06.070) An exciting prospect of genetic engineering is to improve the quality and efficiency of agricultural crops. This broad initiative can proceed in harness with reducing any negative impact of cultivating GM-crops on human health and our environment. To make this approach work, and thus alleviate the global challenges of food production and pressure on natural environments, society must be convinced that such crops when brought into general use have a minimal, and a harmless impact on the wider ecological environment. The research in this proposal will help to yield widely applicable methodologies and protocols for assessing and monitoring the complex of potential impacts of GM crops on their ecological environment. Our project combines extensive expertise in both plant and animal (insect) ecology using a combination of field and laboratory assays, with state of the arts metabolomics to trace the pathways of secondary metabolites, and with a richly appropriate experimental system involving a GM-crop. We will provide a baseline of ecological information for the above-ground community on potato and then move towards targeting different feeding guilds of herbivores and their associated food chains. This project is, thus, designed to establish a platform of choice for monitoring the impact and ecologically-driven effects of GM-crops via their above-ground animal communities, especially the insects. We will establish protocols based on work with potato lines modified for amylopectine production or for Phytophthora resistance. The relevance of our results will be greatly expanded by integrating our project with two other ERGO-funded projects, one on the below-ground community of the same GM-crop (especially microbes) and one working on crucifer crops. Continuous observations will be made using a wide variety of sampling methods that establish the baselines to describe patterns in space and time for the whole community of insects interacting with the potato crop. This information will in turn be used to target particular insects and food chains. This is expected to lead to at least a two-pronged experimental focus that covers herbivory by thrips and by aphids, thus representing two major feeding guilds on this crop. The work with aphids will then follow through to ladybird beetles as crucial predators, and the attendant ants that utilize honeydew produced by aphids. Both lines of work will use so-called tiered approaches to take into account the full range of pathogens, parasites and predators of the herbivores and thus to establish a wide multi-trophic coverage. Analyses of the pathways involved in the transport of secondary metabolites throughout the whole plant will then provide a central platform for exploring and quantifying the multi-trophic interactions. A full integration of our own project on the above-ground communities of insects associated with potato will be made with a parallel ERGO project already implemented on the below-ground community (especially microbes) for the same GM-crops, and also with a project based on crucifer crops. This integration aims at maximizing the whole program s ability to develop baselines, methodologies and protocols that can be widely applied, both in these, and in other crop systems to analyse the full impact of GM-crops on their ecological environment. The comprehensive protocols yielded by this project in harness with the parallel projects will thus enable a wide diversity of direct and indirect effects of GM-crops to be rigorously evaluated in a broader and more complete ecological context, and help to achieve a minimal impact on the environment and on human health.
Netherlands