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Upgrading Your Weed Management Toolkit

 

Weeds are undesirable plants which are persistent and damaging and interfere with the growth of other crop plants thus affecting human activities, agriculture and economy of the country. They compete for light, moisture and nutrients affecting quality and quantity of crop. In addition, they have certain toxic chemicals that cause health problems to humans and animals. Successful weed control is a great challenge. 

Generally weed control can be classified into two categories: 

1. Preventive control, which involves decreasing the weed density on arable land by utilizing natural functions of the eco-system, such as crop rotation, tillage, crop cover, living mulch, etc. 

2. The use of herbicides to protect cultivated crops from weed damage. 

Herbicides play a major role in conventional weed management, but due to their adverse effects on the environment and the emergence of herbicide resistance in plants, this method is being reconsidered. 

Recently, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, CA, and the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, CAS, China, proposed a novel way to kill weeds. They identified a natural-product herbicide together with its resistance gene. In plants and fungi, the branched-chain amino acid biosynthetic pathway performs ‘housekeeping’ functions but is not present in animals. According to researchers, developing compounds which interrupt the branched-chain amino acid biosynthetic pathway might be an efficient approach to eliminate plant growth without side effects in animals. Main focus of these scientists was on the type of enzyme (dihydroxyacid dehydratase) that involved in this biosynthetic pathway. This enzyme is crucial and highly conserved in large number of plants and thus could serve as a desired target for new herbicides. In order to find at least one resistant gene homologous to dihydroxyacid dehydratase, scientists screened natural-product biosynthetic gene clusters in many fungal genomes and they identified a conserved gene cluster in Aspergillus terreus. This cluster consists of four genes and the astD gene is the selected homologue of dihydroxyacid dehydratase. It is also confirmed that aspterric acid specifically targets plant dihydroxyacid dehydratase but not the fungal AstD.

Source

Lei, L. New routes to kill weeds. Nature Plants 4, 509 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-018-0227-5

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