Natures wonders: Snow flea insect poison (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, May 27, 2015, 13:19 (3249 days ago) @ David Turell

It uses a polychlorinated compound to kill other bugs:-http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/snow-fleas-pack-a-chemical-weapon/?WT.mc_id=SA_EVO_20150525-"It's easy to overlook the snow flea: The millimeter-long insect could be mistaken for a flake of pepper on a white wintery landscape. But the little organism packs some powerful chemistry. Researchers led by Stefan Schulz at the Technical University, Braunschweig, in Germany, report that the snow flea, or Ceratophysella sigillata, produces polychlorinated compounds to repel predators (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed, 2015, DOI: 10.1002/anie.201501719). The family of defense compounds, including Sigillin A, is unique in that it is a new class of natural products that features a chemical scaffold that could find application in insect control.-“'It's a very surprising discovery,” comments John A. Pickett, a chemical ecologist at Rothamsted Research Station, in Harpenden, England. It's not often that scientists find any halogens in natural products made by terrestrial organisms, he says. And “here, there's not just one chlorine, but five chlorines.'”