In 2012, protesters descended on an unlikely target: Rothamstead, the oldest agricultural research center in the world and a nonprofit that focuses on sustainable food production. The protesters weren't simply upset with some of the work going on there; they announced in advance that they planned to destroy it. The reason? It involved genetically modified crops.

Researchers at Rothamstead had introduced a gene from peppermint into wheat, allowing the crop to produce a chemical that aphids use as an alarm signal. In lab tests, aphids had avoided wheat carrying the additional gene, suggesting that the GM wheat could limit the need for pesticide applications. The lab findings, however, needed to be validated through field trials. And anti-GMO activists decided that these trials posed an unacceptable risk to the public and farmers and needed to be stopped.

With heightened security, the trials went forward, and the results have now been published. It turns out that the summer the trials were run was cold and rainy, and aphids as a whole didn't do well—there were so few even the control plants were "well below the recommended [pesticide] spray thresholds for summer aphids in the UK." The aphids that were present, however, didn't seem to mind the presence of the alarm pheromone on the transgenic wheat.

The other thing noted by the authors is that the insects tend to emit a single burst of the chemical when alarmed, while the GM plants produce a constant, lower level of it. Given time in the lab, aphids were able to become habituated to the transgenic wheat. So it may be necessary to modify the production of the chemical so its release from plants more closely resembles how it's made by the insects in the first place. They're also considering combining it with plant alarm chemicals, which both repel insects that eat them and attract predators that eat those insects.

In any case, it's somewhat ironic that the trials the protesters tried to stop have now indicated that the crop is not ready for widespread use.

Scientific Reports, 2015. DOI: 10.1038/srep11183 (About DOIs).