How can pesticide spraying save costs and reduce pollution?

Scientists at the University of Vienna in Austria have introduced a cost-saving and less-polluting pesticide spraying method that fills the empty shells of dead bacteria with chemical insecticides and sprinkles them on the leaves and stems of plants. The pesticide sprayed by this method is not easily washed away even in heavy rain, which can improve pesticide use efficiency, save costs, and reduce environmental pollution.

Insecticides previously sprayed on crops are easily washed off when it rains. To ensure the insecticidal effect, spraying must often be repeated. This is both wasteful and increases pesticide pollution of soil and water.

The scientists selected a type of bacterium that easily attaches to plants, extracted a protein from a virus that infects bacteria——bacteriophage virus, and treated these bacteria with it. The protein can punch a small hole in the bacterial shell, penetrate deep into the bacterial cell interior, damage the cytoplasm and nucleus, and leave the bacterium with only an empty shell. The researchers separately filled the bacterial empty shells with chemical insecticides and sprinkled them on barley, cotton, corn, cabbage, rice and soybean plants, then washed them with artificially simulated heavy rain. The results showed that after the "heavy rain," 10% to 55% of the bacterial empty shells had still not been washed away. Among them, the most bacterial empty shells were retained on rice, and the fewest on soybeans.