Genetic Pesticides Could Target Individual Species

Western corn rootworm beetle USDA When farmers want to kill crop pests or weeds now, they often spray their fields with something that can be deadly to a host of animals or plants. But what if they could target individual species, such as corn rootworm? New research, harnessing a Nobel-Prize winning discovery to silence genes, hopes to create such products. "If you use a neuro-poison, it kills everything," Subba Reddy Palli, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky who is researching the te...