Targeting 'cereal' killers with 'omic' tools

The wheat crop, a staple cereal, plays a crucial role in ensuring global food and nutrition security. With rapid explosion of world population and increased focus on food security, there is an urgent demand in increased global wheat production. Insect pests pose one of the greatest challenges that adversely impacts wheat yield. Devastating insect pests of wheat and other cereals, including Hessian fly cause severe economic losses in United States and globally. Deploying resistant wheat cultivars is the most effective and economical strategy to combat these insect pests. However, increased use of elite cultivars exerts selection pressure on the insect population resulting in development of virulent insect biotypes and breakdown of plant resistance. Alternate molecular strategies are required that can complement native durable resistance. To develop an effective molecular strategy, it is crucial to understand molecular mechanisms in play during plant resistance/susceptibility and insect virulence. Multi-omics offers a rapid global approach to mine and identify candidate genes and associated biological pathways that play a significant role during plant-insect interactions and can be targeted via functional genomics. Investigations of wheat interactions with Hessian fly using an ‘omics’ approach has provided greater insight into molecular pathways involved in plant defense and insect virulence, leading the way to generating sound strategies for combating this and other cereal insect pests contributing to global food security.