Historical metabolic adaptation potentiates the rapid evolution of flonicamid resistance in Myzus persicae.

Abstract

Rapid adaptation to novel environments is often shaped not only by newly acquired mutations but also by historical genetic backgrounds established through prior evolutionary events. However, the extent to which such historical contingency contributes to the rapid evolution of insecticide resistance remains poorly understood. Here, we investigated the emergence of resistance to flonicamid, a recently deployed insecticide, in the green peach aphid, Myzus persicae. We show that constitutive overexpression of the P450 enzymes CYP6CY3 and CYP6CY4, already widespread in populations of M. persicae before flonicamid deployment, confers a previously cryptic tolerance phenotype to flonicamid. However, biochemical and transgenic analyses demonstrated that these metabolic adaptations provide only weak protection against flonicamid. Following flonicamid deployment, however, a novel target-site mutation, NaamV251I, in the recently identified molecular target of 4-trifluoromethylnicotinamide (TFNA-AM), emerged in M. persicae on a genetic background of CYP6CY3 or CYP6CY4 overexpression. Structural modeling, enzymatic assays, and CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing demonstrated that this mutation reduces target sensitivity and independently confers moderate resistance. Strikingly, combining the nicotinamidase (Naam) mutation with pre-existing CYP6CY3 or CYP6CY4 overexpression produced substantially elevated resistance phenotypes that far exceeded the effects of either mechanism alone. Our results demonstrate that the pre-existing metabolic background did not itself evolve further following flonicamid deployment but fundamentally altered the phenotypic consequences of a subsequently acquired target-site mutation. These findings provide direct evidence that historical adaptive variation can potentiate rapid resistance evolution to newly introduced insecticides and reveal how interactions between past and contemporary adaptations shape evolutionary responses to novel environmental challenges.