A recent example of transplastomics in agricultural applications was conferring potato plants protection against the Colorado potato beetle.[17] This beetle is dubbed a "super-pest" internationally because it has gained resistance against many insecticides and are extremely voracious feeders.[17] The beetle is estimated to cause up to 1.4 million USD in crop damages annually in Michigan alone.[18] A study conducted in 2015 by Zhang utilized transplastomics to introduce double stranded RNA producing transgenes into the plastid genome.[17] The double stranded RNA confers protection to the transgenic potato plant via a RNA interference methodology, where consumption of the plant tissue by the potato beetle would result in silencing of key genes required by the beetle for survival.[17] There was a high level of protection conferred, the leaves of the transplastomic potato plant were mostly unconsumed when exposed to the adult beetles and larvae.[17] The investigation also revealed an 83% killing efficacy for larvae that consumed the leaves of the transplastomic plant.[17] This study highlights that as pests gain resistance to traditional chemical insecticides, the use of transplastomics to deliver RNAI- mediated crop protection strategies could become increasingly viable in the future.[17]