Weeds often emerge at the same time as vulnerable crop seedlings and sneak between plants as crops grow.
Weeds often emerge at the same time as vulnerable crop seedlings and sneak between plants as crops grow. How do farmers kill them without harming the crops themselves?
Seed and chemical companies have developed two major technologies to avoid crop injury from soil- and foliar-applied herbicides: genetically modified herbicide-tolerant crops; and safeners, chemicals that selectively – and mysteriously – protect certain crops from damage. In a new University of Illinois study, researchers identify genes and metabolic pathways responsible for safener efficacy in grain sorghum.
The discovery goes a long way in explaining how safeners work. According to Dean Riechers, weed scientist in the Department of Crop Sciences at U of I and co-author on the Frontiers in Plant Science study, scientists serendipitously discovered safeners in the late 1940’s. Greenhouse-grown tomato plants were inadvertently exposed to a synthetic plant hormone during an experiment. The tomatoes showed no symptoms of exposure to the hormone itself, but when a herbicide was sprayed later, they were unharmed. Without fully understanding how they worked, researchers began experimenting to find more “herbicide antidotes” before commercializing the first safener (dichlormid) for corn in 1971.
Read more at College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences
Photo: Sorghum plants grown with various chemical treatments. CREDIT: You Soon Baek
