Conclusions
There is considerable potential to improve crop defences
against insect attack by learning from nature and introgressing
traits from crop wild relatives or landraces. For
our maize example, the discovery of two hybrid varieties
and three inbred parental lines that possess the indirect
defence trait elicited by insect eggs in hybrid maize is
promising. This demonstrates a real prospect of introgressing the trait into higher yielding hybrid maize varieties in
a reasonably short time. This could benefit small scale
farmers in Africa who don’t use pesticides to protect their
crops but similar approaches are needed in other parts
of the world where pesticide use is being restricted [36].
The current findings coupled with technological developments
in crop genomics and genetics set the stage for
plant breeding in which herbivore induced defences can
be used to provide better crop resistance against insect
attack.