Indirect plant defense may provide economically important pest suppression in sorghum.

ABSTRACT:

Background

A promising strategy to optimize biological control of insect pests is selecting crop varieties with indirect defense traits. Indirect plant defenses recruit natural enemies to kill pests and include chemical attractants like herbivore-induced plant volatiles. In prior laboratory assays, we found sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L.) cultivar ATx3409/RTx436 infested with sorghum aphid (Melanaphis sorghi Theobald) was attractive to natural enemies and emitted more chemical attractants than two other cultivars. In this field study, we manually infested 9-week-old sorghum plants with aphids and quantified differences in natural enemy and aphid densities among cultivars throughout the growing season. We also used field cages to control access of natural enemies to plants and estimate

SUBMITTER: Russavage EM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12539392 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature