What are biopesticides and biotechnological pesticides?
Chemical pesticides are widely used to control insect pests, plant diseases and weeds in food production, but their negative impacts on the environment and pest resistance are driving research into alternative solutions. An increased use of biological control (biocontrol) and the use of Biopesticides to protect crops could reduce the reliance on synthetic chemical inputs, while maintaining soil health and protecting biodiversity.
By Professor Nina Cedergreen
Biopesticides are biological substances or organisms that damage, kill, disrupt or repel crop pests or diseases. They can be extracts of plants or microbes, or living microbes, parasites, predators or pathogens targeting pests and diseases. Plant and microbial extracts often act as chemical mixtures but, unlike synthetic pesticides, they are 100% biodegradable, not leaving stable metabolites as PFAS behind. Living microbes, parasites and predators reduce pest populations by enhancing naturally occurring control organisms and are often very species-specific.
Biopesticides can also be semiochemicals such as pheromones which are compounds insects use to signal to each other. Placed in traps, they can attract pests, or when released during a mating season, they can for e.g. confuse males thereby preventing fertilisation of eggs in female moths.
Biotechnological pesticides differ from whole microbes or plant extracts by being designed to inhibit pest growth and development with high specificity. Biomolecules in biotechnological pesticides can be ribonucleic acid (RNA), naturally present in all organisms, or peptides, which are short strings of amino acids. These are designed in the lab to match an essential target in the pest. When the pest is exposed, the target is switched off, and the pest cannot survive or reproduce.
Growing knowledge of pest genetics and biology, combined with machine learning, has boosted innovation in biotechnological pesticides. Their design aims to make them very specific, so only targeted pests are killed while beneficial organisms remain unharmed—unlike most chemical pesticides, which affect many non-target species.
A further advantage is that as bioinformatic tools are used to design these pesticides, they may also help to predict possible effects on beneficial organisms and other non-target species. Such predictions could support a safe regulation and build trust, giving farmers access to safer crop protection options thereby reducing dependence on chemicals.
The ENSAFE project aims to build bioinformatic tools to predict the effect of pesticides based on RNA and peptide technologies, and to verify these and other existing models with open access data to underpin the specificity and environmental safety of this new group of plant protection products.