10/22/2011 Todays Bedbugs Are Stronger Than Years Past: Resistance Has Grown To Pesticides Since 1950′s

US researchers have uncovered the genetic mechanism that bed bugs use to resist powerful insecticides, according to a study, leading to the hope of more effective ways to combat the pests.

Bed bugs, which have been largely absent from the United States since the 1950s, have returned in force in the last decade in the US, and notably other Western countries in Europe.

They have, in this time, developed unique resistance to the insecticides that are mainly used against them — deltamethrin and beta-cyfluthrin, both leading pyrethroids.

The genetic research released Wednesday in the journal PLoS One, published by the Public Library, offers new hope to understand their resistance and find new ways to eradicate the blood-sucking bugs.

“Different bed bug populations within the US and throughout the world may differ in their levels of resistance and resistance strategies, so there is the need for continuous surveillance,” said lead author Zach Adelman, associate professor of entomology at Virginia Tech.

Adelman and the other researchers in the study assessed two populations of bed bugs — “a robust, resistant population” found in 2008, and a “non-resistant population” that has been raised in a lab since 1973.

The study determined how each strain succumbed to the pyrethroids, if at all, and determined that over a 24 hour period it required “5,200 times more deltamethrin or 111 times more beta-cyfulthrin” to kill the modern bed bugs compared to the older specimens.

The bed bug’s bite is a little painful rather than dangerous, but many people are scared because the creature mainly attacks when people are asleep.

Continue Reading More:  Todays Bedbugs Are Stronger Than Years Past

20/20/2011 Researchers Find Why Bedbugs Are Resistant To Pesticides

Some of the genetic traits that give bedbugs resistance to insecticideshave been pinpointed by U.S. researchers.

The findings will help efforts to understand the biochemical basis for bedbug resistance to insecticides and provide molecular markers for surveillance.

“Different bedbug populations within the U.S. and throughout the world may differ in their levels of resistance and resistance strategies, so there is the need for continuous surveillance,” study author Zach Adelman, an associate professor of entomology with the Vector-Borne Disease Research Group at Virginia Tech, said in a school news release.

There’s been a resurgence of bedbugs in the United States in the past decade, and some bedbugs have developed a resistance to pyrethroids, one of the few classes of insecticides used to control them.

The Virginia Tech team identified three genes (cytochrome P450 monooxygenases, carboxylesterases and glutathione S-transferases) that produce enzymes that can bind to, deactivate and break down two of the most common pyrethroids, deltamethrin and beta-cyfluthrin.

The researchers also discovered that insecticide-resistant bedbugs have a mutation in the sodium channel gene. This mutation gives the bedbugs partial resistance to pyrethroid insecticides.

Highly resistant bedbug populations can have a number of genetic traits that protect them against pyrethroids and possibly other insecticides, the researchers concluded.

Continue Reading More: Researchers Find Why Bedbugs Are Resistant To Pesticides