Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** insects cause an estimated $7B in…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** insects cause an estimated $7B in damage to global food production despite using the best availablecontrol methods. Current management strategies of using chemicals for their control often causeharm to non-target species. Sterile insect technique approaches are effective INA variety of different species but suffer from wide adoption due to the need for a laborious methodto separate males and the challenge of using radiation for sterilization. New measures have beendeveloped using genetic engineering which either introduce a dominant lethal transgene into theinsect population or rely on engineered insects rendered sterile. In either of the cases, there is a riskfor transgene spreading throughout the population and potentially unintentional consequences.there is a need for control methods that are species-specific, broadly applicable to diverse insects, cost-effective to allow scale-up for control on a regional or national scale, and allow limiting geneflow between insects.spotted wing drosophila (SWD) is one such insect, wheresit approaches could be used for its control. IT has wreaked havoc in the soft fruit industry afterits introduction in the late 2000'S in the US. One of the reasons for real concern from swdinfestation is the loss of revenue in different fruit farming. As much as 30% loss of productioncan be directly attributed to SWD infestation despite adopting the best control measures, which is estimated to be $400 million every year from all the farmed and wild fruit revenue. Traditional practices and habits ofpest control DON't work against SWD since the fly doesn't SIT out in the open where IT would beeasy to kill. While not very effective, the total cost of traditional control including materials, labor, and machines to apply insecticides, deploy mass trapping devices, and mount and maintainenclosure nets is about $2000/HA. This is a significant burden on farmers, who were usedto spraying insecticides just once or twice in an entire season of fruit production. The use of the sitapproach for SWD could be a very effective method of control, but requires means to sort malesand effective means of sterilization in a cost-effective manner. In this proposal, we aim to batch-produce onlyswd males that DON't contain anytransgene, using geneticengineering of SEX chromosomes followed by a specific mating scheme, which can then besterilized and released for population control. This approach forgoes manual SEX separation and canbe adapted to any sexually reproducing organism. The introduced insects and their traits will beremoved from the population as soon as they DIE. This proposal, if successful would drastically simplify the use of SIT in SWD and open doors to using SIT in virtually any sexually reproducing insect species.