In 'Plant Armor' crop cover, insects have to navigate textile maze


Date:
April 6, 2022
Source:
North Carolina State University
Summary:
Researchers designed a textile 'Plant Armor' that forces insects to
navigate a maze-like path if they try to reach a plant. The design
was more effective at blocking insects from reaching cabbage plants
in multiple experiments, as compared with an alternative crop cover.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== North Carolina State University researchers designed a textile "Plant
Armor" that forces insects to navigate a maze-like path if they try to
reach a plant.

The design was more effective at blocking insects from reaching cabbage
plants in multiple experiments, compared with an alternative crop cover.


========================================================================== Based on their findings, researchers said the Plant Armor could provide
a more effective, chemical-free alternative for insect protection.

"We found it's possible to use this new technology to protect against
insects we didn't think we could protect against," said the study's first author Grayson Cave, a doctoral candidate at NC State. "We've shown we
can use a mechanical barrier that will protect against tobacco thrips and possibly other insects, allowing the plant to grow and thrive underneath." Previously, plant covers have been designed to exclude insects based on
size alone -- like a window screen -- researchers said. However, that
strategy can be problematic for trying to keep out insects as small as
tobacco thrips, which are about the size of a pencil point.

"To exclude insects that are really small using traditional textile
cover designs, the size of the openings would have to be so small that it
would also prevent water, air and moisture from penetrating," said the
study's senior researcher Mike Roe, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Entomology at NC State. "We had to come up with another way
of excluding the insects other than just based on pore size." To that
end, the researchers designed a three-layer, 3D cover knitted using
clear yarn in the outermost and innermost layers. The yarn, which can
be made from recycled plastic, still allows sunlight to pass through
but restricts insects from reaching plants. A knitted inner layer is
sandwiched perpendicular to the two surrounding layers, creating a
maze-like structure within the Plant Armor.



========================================================================== "With our design, the insect has to figure out how to get through the
maze to get to the plant on the other side," Roe said. "The tortuosity
makes it more challenging to get through. The insect has a certain amount
of time to find food or it will die. That time is relatively fast for a
young insect." In the first of three experiments, researchers found it
took significantly longer for insects to penetrate the Plant Armor. They
placed a cabbage leaf and 10 tobacco thrips inside a Petri dish, separated
by the Plant Armor or another crop cover. It took approximately three
hours for five of the thrips to make it through the Plant Armor, while
it took only 12 minutes for them to cross a commercially available, single-layer crop cover. In the same experiment with young, unfed
caterpillars, their design was nearly 90% effective at preventing unfed
young caterpillars from crossing the Plant Armor in 12 hours.

"In real life, the insect has a lot of other choices of where to go
to find food; this was a worst-case scenario where they had only one
place to go," Roe said. "So we expect in the natural environment, the protection is going to be much greater." When researchers tested how
well they could protect potted cabbage plants inside a cage with unfed caterpillars, uncovered plants were infested and almost completely eaten,
while plants covered and sealed with Plant Armor were not. They did not
find a single caterpillar on the covered plants after 10 days.

Their last experiment was a three-month, outdoor field trial testing how
well the Plant Armor worked when they used it like a greenhouse cover. The researchers found plants covered with Plant Armor were larger on average;
the weight of cabbages under the Plant Armor was almost three times
larger than the control.



========================================================================== Researchers said more work is needed to determine whether they
successfully excluded insects due to the thickness, pore size or maze-like structure of the inner layer. However, their work provides evidence that
their chemical-free design can work against tiny critters.

"Thrips are extremely tiny," Cave said. "If we could keep them out, we
think we have a good chance of keeping other, larger insects out. And
as for the neonate caterpillars -- they have to feed immediately, and
they're the tiniest stage of caterpillars. This gives us some good,
preliminary data that this would work toward being protective against
other caterpillars too." Researchers think their crop cover could be a
good alternative for high-value crops like grapes. In future research,
they also want to explore whether the cover could be used to help protect plants in extreme conditions -- and as the climate changes.

"Part of what we're doing is finding new, smart textiles," said study
co-author Andre West, associate professor of textile, apparel and
technology management at NC State and director of Zeis Textiles
Extension. "We think this design could help farmers in extreme
environments or where crop production is limited in certain areas. It
could also be an alternative for organic farmers. Not only is the product itself made with some recycled materials, but it could also be recycled
again." The study, "Novel 3-D Spacer Textiles to Protect Crops from Insect-Infestation and that Enhance Plant Growth," was published online
in the journal Agriculture. Co-authors include Marian G. McCord, senior
vice provost at the University of New Hampshire and adjunct professor
in the NC State Department of Forest Biomaterials; Bryan Koene and
Benjamin Beck of Luna Innovations; and Jean M. Deguenon and Kun Luan, postdoctoral research scholars at NC State.

This paper is based upon on work supported by the National Institute of
Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under Agreement
No. 2015- 33610-23785 of the Small Business Innovation Research Grants
Program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions, or recommendations
expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not
necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Cave
was supported in part by a teaching assistantship from NC State, and
Cave and Roe are supported by the N.C.

Agricultural Experiment Station.

Conflicts of interest: Vector Textiles holds exclusive license for a
patent connected to the Plant Armor technology. McCord, Roe, and West
are inventors on the patent related to the technology owned by NC State,
and would share in revenues derived from commercialization.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided
by North_Carolina_State_University. Original written by Laura
Oleniacz. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Grayson L. Cave, Andre J. West, Marian G. McCord, Bryan Koene, J.

Benjamin Beck, Jean M. Deguenon, Kun Luan, R. Michael Roe. Novel
3- D Spacer Textiles to Protect Crops from Insect Infestation and
That Enhance Plant Growth. Agriculture, 2022; 12 (4): 498 DOI:
10.3390/ agriculture12040498 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220406132426.htm

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