LAUSR

Insect pests cause billions of dollars of losses in agriculture and livestock and hundreds of millions of disease cases every year due to the transmission of pathogens and parasites. Today, insecticide-based applications are still the most widespread strategy for controlling insect pests and disease vectors, and inmany cases are the only effective solution available. At the same time, however, an increasing development of resistance to the main substance classes is being observed worldwide and in many different species. Moreover, the unacceptable impacts of insecticides on human health, non-target species, and the environment and biodiversity has become a major concern in recent decades. Alternative control approaches for insect pests that are effective, sustainable and speciesspecific are therefore in high demand. Genetic control is a type of biological control and a promising approach to regulate insect pest populations in a species-specific manner. It is based on targeting the reproductive capacity of the target pest species to reduce population size to non-critical levels. The best known and also very successful genetic control strategy is the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT), which entails the continuous mass-release of irradiation-sterilized males of a given species to produce infertile matings in the field, leading to the decline in the target population over time. To date, SIT is only available for a few species, as its transfer to new target species is challenging and time consuming. Key aspects of this classical SIT and challenges in applying it to new pest species include mass rearing of target species, mass removal of female insects prior to irradiation and release, the sterilization procedure, and the biological quality control of the sterile insects produced. Besides this classical SIT strategy, current research efforts are also focused on the development of genetic control approaches based on transgenic, symbiont-mediated, or gene-drive strategies. Modern genetic technologies offer new solutions for the improvement of existing genetic control strategies and insect strains, for faster and easier transfer of existing strategies to new target species, and also for the development of new genetic control OPEN ACCESS