Distinguished University Professor David Denlinger, Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, has spent years figuring out how to foil and disarm the ability of insect pests to do damage.

An insect physiologist, Denlinger was one of the first to discover that insects have hormones and has used that key knowledge ever since to build his arsenal.

Now, he and his team have found compounds composed of synthetic molecules that mimic the structure of a hormone in the crop-eating insect, the corn earworm. These compounds have three different effects on diapause, a hibernation-like state of arrested development that allows many types of bugs to survive through the winter.

These agents can force the insects out of diapause prematurely, preventing them from entering diapause, or block the termination of diapause.

“Diapause is such an important aspect of the life cycle,” Denlinger said. “If we can do anything to disrupt the timing of that, make them go into diapause at the wrong time or break them out too early when there is no food available—that would be a pretty effective tool and a possible control strategy.”

This finding holds the potential to develop natural and targeted controls against the corn earworm, which infests more than 100 types of plants and costs American farmers an estimated $2 billion a year in losses and control costs.

Read more at Ohio State Research News.