Herbicide no match for fruit flies’ gut microbes
Bacteria team up to protect insects from toxic chemical atrazine
ORLANDO, Fla. — Fruit flies can break down a popular herbicide with help from friendly microbes, new research suggests.
Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies have no genes needed to process an herbicide called atrazine, statistical biologist James “Ben” Brown of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California said July 16 at the Allied Genetics Conference. Researchers expected that the inability to break down the herbicide might make the chemical, which is often sprayed on cornfields, toxic to the flies. But after feeding atrazine to fruit flies for 72 hours, Brown and colleagues detected very little response to the chemical.