Great job by Erin for her first ever oral presentation. #SOLRUB2025 Our paper describing part of the work presented can be found here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Great job by Erin for her first ever oral presentation. #SOLRUB2025 Our paper describing part of the work presented can be found here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
A nice collection of papers on herbivore detection in plants including our paper on the evolution of butterfly egg-killing in this virtual issue! @lottecaarls.bsky.social
Check out this blog post on the trials we performed at WUR Plant Breeding group in the EU #SAGROPIA project. We tested the effect of some new alternatives to current pesticides on aphids and Colorado Potato Beetle.
What are we doing next? We aim to further study the genetics and mechanisms of the identified whitefly resistance and test the stability of identified resistant accessions in the field β a project of PhD student @Erin Rini.
These experiments were financially supported by the Deltaβs under pressure and Deltas: salinity and drought projects (KB35 Food Security and Valuing Water programβproject numbers KB-35-001-001 and KB-35-101-002)βfunded by the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Safety, the Netherlands.
We also measured the phytohormones ABA, JA, and SA, and saw differences between a resistant and a susceptible accession, but the cause for increased susceptibility is not clear yet.
Susceptibility to whitefly increased when pepper plants experienced salt stress.
We also saw difference between accessions for whitefly survival and reproduction, and identified four accessions with low survival of whiteflies that are potentially resistant.
We saw an effect of salt on plant growth, which depended on accession.
In this paper, we ask how Capsicum plants would cope under a double stress, in our case whitefly infestation and salt stress. We used 25 Capsicum accessions, from four different species, and grew the plants for 3 weeks with and without a salt treatment, and then performed a whitefly assay.
Our paper on the effect of salinity on whitefly resistance in Capsicum is now online in Environmental and Experimental Botany -> doi.org/10.1016/j.en... - summary β¬οΈ