Pour soda over the garden
Scientists: artificial sweetener turned out to be a powerful pesticide
The artificial sweetener erythritol, widely used today in the production of carbonated beverages, turned out to be a powerful pesticide and "contraceptive" for fruit flies and other insects, according to an article published in the Journal of Applied Entomology: O'Donnell et al., Erythritol ingestion impairs adult reproduction and causes larval mortality in Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies (Diptera: Drosophilidae).
"Many insect control measures focus on suppressing their ability to reproduce, rather than killing the adults themselves. Erythritol can be used as a pesticide in a variety of ways – and to combat adults, and egg clutches, and larvae, or all of this at the same time," says Sean O'Donnell from Drexel University in Philadelphia (in a press release, Common Artificial Sweetener is Likely a Safe, Effective Birth Control, Pesticide for Insects, Drexel Study Finds – VM).
Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners are now widely used in the food industry to lower food prices and reduce their caloric content when creating "diet" drinks and dishes. In recent years, some scientists have begun to study the side effects of the use of sweeteners, fixing their possible links with the development of cancer, diabetes, obesity and a number of other diseases.
Other scientists, on the contrary, claim that such effects do not really exist and that sweeteners either do not affect people's health, or have a beneficial effect with moderate consumption. There is no general consensus on their role in human life yet, and doctors continue to debate artificial sweeteners and investigate their properties.
O'Donnell discovered an unexpected beneficial property of erythritol, one of these sweeteners, by studying the results of early experiments aimed at assessing its safety for humans. As a rule, such experiments, as scientists say, are first conducted on insects and mice, and only then, if they are completed successfully, their tests begin on volunteers.
Studying the results of experiments concerning the safety of erythritol, scientists drew attention to the fact that this sugar substitute killed fruit flies even in relatively small concentrations, but was not poisonous to mice and humans. This led them to the idea that this substance can be used as a pesticide safer for humans than other insecticides that can cause severe poisoning or cancer.
They tested this idea by monitoring whether erythritol could destroy not only adult flies, but also their larvae, which differ markedly in their anatomy and metabolism from sexually mature individuals. To do this, the scientists planted several clutches of eggs on pieces of this sugar substitute and tracked how the fly larvae grew.
The experiment showed that erythritol does not kill drosophila eggs upon contact, but it destroys the larvae quickly enough after hatching if they start eating food with a sufficiently large amount of this "sugar". Not a single insect from these clutches survived to pupation, having lived on average only 1.5 days after hatching. Similar results, as the researchers note, were obtained in experiments on other insects.
Small doses of this substance, as scientists have discovered, have a strange effect on adult flies. They do not kill, but temporarily sterilize them, actually turning into an analogue of contraceptives used today to prevent unwanted pregnancy. Accordingly, spraying small amounts of this artificial sugar over fruit and vegetable plantings can protect them from attacks by pest caterpillars, while not destroying important pollinators, many of which are adults of these insects.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru
25.05.2017