The control of aphids as insect pests - From chemical crop protection to plant resistance

Aphids are important insect pests due to their mass occurrence combined with direct feeding damage and their ability to transmit viruses. Contrary to the documented decline in insect diversity, aphids are apparently less affected by this trend, showing constant or even increasing numbers. For a long time, aphids could be controlled with a high efficiency by the use of chemical insecticides. However, various reasons (socio-political acceptance as well as spread of resistance) lead to a restriction of the use of conventional chemical insecticides and thus to the need to develop tools for alternative strategies. The concept of Integrated Pest Management provides various alternative approaches for pest control, e.g., plant resistance and several examples for prototypic field applications exist. In addition, the possibilities of aphid monitoring as well as examples of the use of new breeding methods (genome editing) and new dsRNA-based insecticides are discussed.