A recent example of transplastomics in agricultural applications was conferring potato plants protection against the Colorado potato beetle. This beetle is dubbed a "super-pest" internationally because it has gained resistance against many insecticides and are extremely voracious feeders. The beetle is estimated to cause up to 1.4 million USD in crop damages annually in Michigan alone. A study conducted in 2015 by Zhang utilized transplastomics to introduce double stranded RNA producing transgenes into the plastid genome. 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. 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. The investigation also revealed an 83% killing efficacy for larvae that consumed the leaves of the transplastomic plant. 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.