“One of the big issues in monitoring these flies [spotted-wing drosophila] in order to make pest management decisions is that the traps and lures that attract them also attract a lot of other Drosophila species,” says Justin Renkema, Ph.D. “And because they are fairly similar, it takes a lot of work to go through all the samples to count the number of SWD. … What we wanted to do is try to use a molecular test to replace looking at the flies under a microscope and counting them.”(Photo by Justin Renkema, Ph.D.)