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The aim of the study was to determine the effectiveness of regularly applied biological control by continuous monitoring of pests with the help of color traps (sticky sheets) and flower tests with joint species identification of the useful insects to determine the extent to which native useful insects can settle next to the introduced predatory ones. The latter process is to be facilitated by growing a flowering mixture of annual plants at one of the experimental sites, which provides adequate feeding and hiding place for beneficial insects. The experiment was carried out in Szentes. The peppers in protected cultivation were grown in two unheated polytunnels. The color traps were laid out in three different places in politunnels. A total of 11 color traps were collected from the experimental area (from April till September). During the experimental period, the main pests damaging peppers were western flower thrips (Frankliniella occidentalis) and tobacco thrips (Thrips tabaci). The highest thrips number (F. occidentalis, 40 pieces) was counted on 9th June in 2020. Useful insects in the experiment: predatory mites (Amblyseius spp.), predatory flower bugs (Orius laevigatus) and the banded thrips (Aeolothrips spp.). The highest useful insect’s number (Aeolothrips spp., 11 pieces) was counted in the 20th September in 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pepper ( Capsicum L.) is a nutritionally and economically important crop that is cultivated throughout the world as a vegetable, condiment, and food additive. Genetic transformation using Agrobacterium tumefaciens (agrobacterium) is a powerful biotechnology tool that could be used in pepper to develop community-based functional genomics resources and to introduce important agronomic traits. However, pepper is considered to be highly recalcitrant for agrobacterium-mediated transformation, and current transformation protocols are either inefficient, cumbersome or highly genotype dependent. The main bottleneck in pepper transformation is the inability to generate cells that are competent for both regeneration and transformation. Here, we report that ectopic expression of the Brassica napus BABY BOOM AP2/ERF transcription factor overcomes this bottleneck and can be used to efficiently regenerate transgenic plants from otherwise recalcitrant sweet pepper ( C. annuum) varieties. Transient activation of BABY BOOM in the progeny plants induced prolific cell regeneration and was used to produce a large number of somatic embryos that could be converted readily to seedlings. The data highlight the utility of combining biotechnology and classical plant tissue culture approaches to develop an efficient transformation and regeneration system for a highly recalcitrant vegetable crop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]