Corn, soybean, and cotton farmers shudder at the thought of Palmer amaranth invading their fields.
Corn, soybean, and cotton farmers shudder at the thought of Palmer amaranth invading their fields. The aggressive cousin of waterhemp – itself a formidable adversary – grows extremely rapidly, produces hundreds of thousands of seeds per plant, and is resistant to multiple classes of herbicides, including glyphosate.
Palmer’s resistance to PPO-inhibiting herbicides, a group of chemicals that disrupt chlorophyll synthesis, is especially problematic with glyphosate out of the picture. Farmers had been turning to PPO-inhibitors as an effective alternative, until resistance was discovered in waterhemp in 2001 and in Palmer in 2011.
Pat Tranel from the University of Illinois has been working to understand the mechanisms of resistance to PPO-inhibitors for years, and was the first to discover key mutations in both weed species. Now, in two new studies, he goes farther to explain Palmer’s evil genius.
Read more at College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences
Photo: Palmer amaranth infestation. Photo by Pat Tranel
