"With a rapidly growing world population combined with a loss of available agricultural land, there is an urgent need to increase the efficiency of food production to prevent global food shortages. Herbicides play an important part in improving crop yields by protecting them from invasive weeds. To address the rising levels of resistance emerging against existing crop protection agents, and to improve the environment safety associated with such agents, there is an urgent need to discover and develop new herbicides with novel mechanisms of action to fight weeds. In this search, natural products with their unique chemical architectures and prominent bioactivities offer an excellent entry point. In 2008, researchers discovered a new and promising class of herbicide produced by a common fungus. The most active compound was named phyllostictine A and was shown be more active in an assay against the wheat pest thistle than fusaric acid, a well-known and powerful toxin; and faster acting than the well known and often used herbicide glyphosate. Consequently, phyllostictine A offers a potentially exciting new lead in the development of new herbicides.
The overall objectives of the project were to:
- develop new sustainable chemical methods that can be used to make phyllostictine A and related chemical structures in the laboratory;
- make the natural product in the laboratory, to unambiguously confirm its chemical structure and determine the ""handedness"" (chirality) of the molecule.
- explore the weed killing potential of the new chemicals made under this programme to see if we can find new, easy-to-make compounds that mimic the behaviour of the natural product.
- use these new agents to help learn how phyllostictine kills weeds at the molecular level."
