About State Key Laboratory of Integrated Management of Pest Insects and Rodents

State Key Laboratory of Integrated Management of Pest Insects and Rodents

The State Key Laboratory of Integrated Management of Pest Insects and Rodents is a national research laboratory based at the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing. On its own English-language website the laboratory is presented in shortened form as the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Pest Management. Its subject is one of the oldest practical problems in Chinese agriculture — how insect pests and pest rodents damage crops, grasslands and stored food, and how that damage can be prevented or reduced by understanding the biology of the animals themselves rather than by relying on chemical control alone. The laboratory's research spans insect–plant interactions and chemical communication, insect immunity and physiology, rodent physiological ecology and population management, the control of invasive alien species, and integrated pest management under global climate change.

Place within the Institute of Zoology

The laboratory is one of three state key laboratories at the Institute of Zoology, alongside the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology and the State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology; the institute also hosts CAS key laboratories for animal ecology and conservation biology and for zoological systematics and evolution. The Institute of Zoology itself is a government-funded research institution with a history of more than 90 years: its predecessor was the Fan Memorial Institute of Biology, founded in 1928, and figures such as Bing Zhi, its first director and one of the founders of modern biology in China, began their careers there. Thirteen CAS academicians have worked at the institute over its history. Its record of national service includes the successful control of China's chronic agricultural pest, the locust, the control and management of other pest insects and rodents, the establishment of nature reserves, and the conservation of the giant panda, the crested ibis and other endangered wildlife. The pest laboratory works within that tradition, addressing pest outbreaks that, as the institute notes, pose a substantial threat to agriculture and human health, and advancing what it calls green control science for pest insects and rodents in line with national priorities for food security and ecological security.

Reorganisation into a successor laboratory

China's state key laboratory system has been reorganised in recent years, and this laboratory's work now continues within a larger successor body. The State Key Laboratory of Animal Biodiversity Conservation and Integrated Pest Management was established through the integration and reorganisation of the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Pest Management, the CAS Key Laboratory of Zoological Systematics and Evolution, and the CAS Key Laboratory of Animal Ecology and Conservation Biology. It was approved for preparatory establishment by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2023 and received official endorsement from the Ministry of Science and Technology, joining the list of state key laboratories in 2024. The reorganised laboratory focuses on three major research directions — trends in animal diversity changes; animal ecology, behaviour and conservation; and precision control of pest animals — and aims to uncover the mechanisms underlying the formation, maintenance and loss of animal diversity, as well as the patterns of pest outbreaks and alien species invasion. It reports 54 academic leaders, including two academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and 14 recipients of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars. This profile retains the laboratory's long-attested name, under which its groups and publications are widely cited.

Insect–plant interactions and chemical communication

A central line of work concerns how insects find, recognise and choose their host plants and mates through chemical signals. The group led by Chen-Zhu Wang studies the physiological and molecular aspects of insect–plant interactions and the chemical communication of insects, using a distinctive model system: two sibling moth species, Helicoverpa armigera and Helicoverpa assulta. Despite their evolutionary proximity the two differ sharply in host range — H. armigera is a generalist and H. assulta a specialist — which makes the pair a natural experiment in coevolution. The group's goals are to understand the mechanistic basis of plant–insect interactions and the genetic basis of female sex pheromone signals and male olfactory responses, with a long-term aim of developing pest control strategies that disrupt insect recognition of host-plant and mate cues. Its projects, supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the National Key R&D Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology, extend the system to a third trophic level — the natural enemies that attack the herbivores — and to related species including Mythimna separata and the fall armyworm Spodoptera frugiperda.

Among the group's reported results is evidence that host generalisation can be an alternative evolutionary strategy to host specialisation, and the first successful interspecific hybridisation between H. armigera and H. assulta, which created a unique system for genetic studies of reproductive isolation. A second study system pairs brassicaceous plants with their specialist feeders: the group has discovered the gustatory receptor tuned to the plant hormone brassinolide in the diamondback moth and characterised the first gustatory receptor tuned to glucosinolates in the cabbage white butterfly, and it uses genome editing in these caterpillars to study the olfactory and gustatory receptors involved in herbivory. The laboratory's methods for this work combine CRISPR/Cas9, transcriptomics, gene cloning and expression, in situ hybridisation, Xenopus and Drosophila expression systems, single-cell and tip recording, calcium imaging, electroantennography, gas chromatography coupled to electroantennographic detection, and wind-tunnel behaviour assays.

Ecological genomics and the locust problem

The laboratory's best-known research programme addresses the migratory locust, a worldwide pest whose swarms threaten agricultural and environmental safety. The Ecological Genomics and Adaptation Group led by Le Kang was established in 1995 and, using locusts and leafminers as model systems, has deciphered mechanisms underlying locust phase change — the transformation between solitary and gregarious forms — insect cold hardiness, and the chemical signals mediating tritrophic interactions in plant–pest–parasitoid webs. In 2020 the group and collaborators reported in Nature that 4-vinylanisole (4VA) is an aggregation pheromone of the migratory locust Locusta migratoria. Both gregarious and solitary locusts are strongly attracted to 4VA regardless of age and sex; although it is emitted specifically by gregarious locusts, its production can be triggered by the aggregation of just four to five solitary locusts, and it acts through a specific olfactory receptor, OR35: knocking out OR35 with CRISPR–Cas9 markedly reduced the antennae's electrophysiological responses and impaired the behavioural attraction, and field trapping experiments verified 4VA's attractiveness to experimental and wild populations. Later work from Kang's team, published in Science Advances, used 4VA to map a complete olfactory transduction pathway in locusts, centred on inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate (IP3) as a core second messenger. Kang's profile also credits his group with identifying phenylacetonitrile (PAN) as an olfactory aposematic signal and cyanide precursor involved in swarm group defence. These findings are explicitly aimed at eco-friendly control strategies, such as pheromone traps or blocking the pheromone's perception, in place of broad insecticide use.

Rodent physiological ecology and population management

The rodent half of the laboratory's mandate is represented by researchers including Zhi-Bin Zhang and Xue-Ying Zhang. Zhang's research examines the impacts of global change on the population and community dynamics of animals and their interactions with plants and microbes, seeking novel methods for pest control and biodiversity conservation. Using long-term historical records and monitoring data, his group has studied how global climate factors such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation and global temperature drive or modify the population dynamics of Brandt's voles and Yangtze voles in China, rodent-borne plague occurrence, and even the famous ten-year cycles of snowshoe hare and lynx in Canada. Within the laboratory, Xue-Ying Zhang's work on rodent physiological ecology asks how wild rodents adapt to extreme temperatures and droughts, how environmental stress before and after birth programmes adult physiological and behavioural phenotypes, and what role gut microbes and the gut–brain axis play in rodent adaptation — analysis intended to reveal the mechanisms regulating rodent survival and reproduction and to provide new theories and technologies for the ecological prevention and control of grassland rodents.

A widely reported example of the rodent work appeared in Current Biology in 2022. Studying Brandt's voles (Lasiopodomys brandtii) in Inner Mongolian steppe grassland, researchers from the laboratory with Northeast Normal University and the universities of Exeter and Florida showed that the voles cut down tall, unpalatable bunchgrass (Achnatherum splendens) when shrikes — predatory birds — are nearby, an example of ecosystem engineering that improves the voles' view of approaching predators and reduces their predation risk. When birds were excluded with nets, the behaviour disappeared. As Zhang commented, keeping or planting such bunchgrasses could help attract shrikes and thereby reduce vole population density — a management implication drawn directly from basic behavioural ecology.

Invasive species and pest management under climate change

Two cross-cutting themes complete the laboratory's stated scope. The first is invasive alien species: Kang's leafminer work concerns invasive leaf-mining flies, and the reorganised laboratory lists the patterns of alien species invasion among the core questions it exists to answer, alongside pest outbreak dynamics. The second is climate change: the laboratory explicitly frames part of its programme as integrated pest management under global climate change, and Zhang's population studies supply the long-term evidence base — linking climate oscillations to locust, vole and plague dynamics — on which forecasting and preventive management can be built. The institute as a whole lists monitoring and control of invasive species and prevention and control of wildlife-borne infectious diseases among the fields in which its achievements have been recognised nationally and internationally.

People

Le Kang, born in 1959, is a professor of entomology and ecology at the Institute of Zoology who obtained his PhD in ecology from the CAS Graduate School and the institute in 1990. He has served as director of the Institute of Zoology and as chairman of the scientific committee of this laboratory, was Director-General of the CAS Bureau of Life Science and Biotechnology from 1999 to 2008, and has been president of the Entomological Society of China since 2012. He was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2011, to the World Academy of Sciences in 2012 and as an international member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2021, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Nebraska in 2009, and has authored more than 200 papers in journals including Nature, Science and PNAS. Chen-Zhu Wang heads the insect behaviour and plant–insect interaction group described above, and Zhi-Bin Zhang leads the rodent population ecology work; both groups publish under the laboratory's name in Beijing (postal address 1 Beichen West Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100101).

Significance

The laboratory represents a distinctively ecological approach to pest control within China's national laboratory system: instead of starting from a pesticide, its groups start from the pest's own sensory biology, genomics, physiology and population ecology, and look for points of intervention — a pheromone that can be blocked or used as bait, a receptor that can be targeted, a predator relationship that can be encouraged, a climate signal that can be used for forecasting. Its results include a Nature-published solution to the long-standing question of what makes locusts aggregate, a unique hybrid system for studying how crop pests evolve their host ranges, and field evidence that a grassland rodent engineers its own habitat against predators. Through its reorganised successor, that work now sits inside a broader national mission linking animal diversity conservation with the precision control of pest animals for food and ecological security.