ABOUT US

The Fruit fly Research Laboratory

Our research is aimed at achieving a better understanding and control of Australia's most important pest, the Queensland fruit fly (Qfly) and most of it has direct relevance to market access.

Our 'high-tech' work is on improving the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT). This is the only technique approved for maintaining area freedom from fruit flies and is thus a pre-requisite for crops requiring access to overseas and some domestic markets.

Our 'low-tech' work is on increasing the proportion of pest-free fruit where complete absence of fruit flies is not possible or too expensive. Such a strategy is of great significance to home gardeners in Australia and to village agriculture in the countries of our region.

Our initial work

From 1993 (as the Fruit Fly Research Centre) we concentrated on isolating a set of DNA markers to "fingerprint" Q-fly populations. These markers were used to analyse Q-fly populations throughout eastern and central Autralia and to investigate the source of infestations. Our results have been used by State Departments of Agriculture in:

the design of monitoring and control strategies,
a program to eradicate Q-fly from Alice Springs and
the definition of criteria used to define outbreaks for quarantine purposes.

The FFRL today

In collaboration with with Industry and State Government departments, we have been concentrating on research to improve the performance of the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) for Q-fly. SIT is based on the release of overflooding numbers of sterile pest insects into an area of infestation, so that essentially all wild females mate with sterile males and do not produce offspring to infest fruit in the next generation. SIT has been strikingly successful elsewhere in eradicating pest insects, including the Mediterranean fruit fly (Medfly) from Chile and Mexico. Problems with SIT for Q-fly have included relatively poor performance of the sterile released flies, the lack of a reliable marker to distinguish released sterile males from wild flies and the lack of a strain that allows sterile males to be released in the absence of sterile females. We have:

developed a four-way crossing program that yields SIT strains with improved performance.
produced a strain with a unique DNA marker and developed a simple and robust test for this marker, with positive identification of both marked and unmarked (wild) flies.
isolated a number of genes in the sex-determination pathway, with a view to using these for the construction of male-only strains.
achieved genetic transformation for Q-fly.

The future

Following the success of our work, we have extended our objectives to include the related fruit fly pests, B. neohumeralis (which is as serious a pest as Q-fly in parts of Queensland) and B. jarvisi (sometimes called NT-fly, since it is a minor pest in the NT and northern WA). With the spread of horticulture into the northern tropical regions of Australia, NT-fly has the potential to become a highly destructive pest. We have isolated a number of genes from this species including sex-determination genes, yolk-protein genes, mitochondrial genes and a Y-chromosome marker that will be useful in the study of sex-determination in NT-fly and Q-fly.

Research support