Hence, we did not explore the potential for substituting a candidate product that is only used for a specific pest and/or crop by an alternative product that is authorised for broad-spectrum use against a large group of pests and/or in multiple crops.
Number of pest species with number of known hosts, separately for each major group of pests.
Descriptive moments of the number of known hosts for each major group of pests.
Kolmogorov Smirnov tests to compare empirical cumulative distribution functions for number of known hosts for each major group of pests.
This basic approach was used separately for each of nine biologically meaningful groups of pest and pathogens: bacteria, fungi, oomycetes, insects, mites, mollusks, nematodes, viruses, and plants.
The probability that two host genera share a pest or pathogen declined significantly with phylogenetic distance between the hosts, for all groups of pest and pathogens except mollusks (Table 1, Figs 3 and S3 S5).
However, the link to specific immune responses is mainly limited to bacteria in the insects (Kurtz 2005) and there are few data that relate to groups of pest insects and their pathogens (but see Roth et al. 2009).
However, no assays have been conducted to date using the same set of enzymes against two broadly different groups of pests.
Analyses of each of the nine groups of pests and pathogens supported this expectation (Figs 4 and S6).
All groups of pests and pathogens showed strong phylogenetic signals in their host ranges (Fig. 3, Table 1, Figs S3 S5), with the exception of mollusks.
Primarily plant-feeding as larvae and nectar-feeding as adults, they are a prominent element of terrestrial ecosystems, functioning as herbivores, pollinators and prey, as well as constituting one of the most damaging groups of pests overall to agriculture.
