Endowed Professor in Urban Entomology University of Florida Gainesville, Florida
German cockroaches are highly prone to developing insecticide resistance, even to the newest products available in the market. This is due to their evolutionary history of exposure to a wide range of pesticide classes over the past century and the relatively closed nature of their populations, which facilitates rapid increases of resistance frequencies with insecticide selection. This talk will summarize studies to compare different diagnostic bioassays for resistance monitoring purposes (vial, feeding and Ebeling choice assays), as well as studies that used diagnostic assays to document changes of resistance levels in field populations in response to defined insecticide selection pressures. Additionally, transcriptome data will be presented showing significant changes in expression of resistance genes in association with field selection. Overall, results show (i) the utility of diagnostic assays for resistance assessment purposes and (ii) congruent responses of resistance mechanisms at a molecular level that agree with field-level findings. The latter results strongly suggest observed control failures are the result of a buildup of resistance in field populations, rather than applicator error or quality control issues with products.
