The Future

Herbicide discovery and screening will benefit greatly from the onslaught of analytical, molecular, and ‘-omic’ technologies appearing in recent years.  Many advantages previously enjoyed by the pharmaceutical industry are now becoming available to the agrichemical industries.  However, these advantages may be partially offset by increasingly stringent regulatory requirements for environmental safety and the absence of effects on non-target organisms. 

ADDITIONAL READING 

Abell, LM. 1996. Biochemical approaches to herbicide discovery: advances in enzyme target identification and inhibitor design. Weed Sci. 44:734-742.

Grossmann, K. 2005. What it takes to get a herbicide’s mode of action. Physionomics, a classical approach in a new complexion. Pest Manag Sci 61:423–431.

Hess FD, RJ Anderson, and JD Reagan. 2000.  High throughput synthesis and screening:  the partner of genomics for discovery of new chemicals for agriculture.  Weed Sci. 49:249-256.

Hole, SJW, Howe, PWA, Stanley, PD and Hadfield, ST. 2000. Pattern recognition analysis of endogenous cell metabolites for high throughput mode of action identification: Removing the postscreening dilemma associated with whole-organism high throughput screening. J. Biomol. Screening 5:335-342.

Lein, W, F Börnke, A Reindl, T Ehrhardt, M Stitt, and U. Sonnewald. 2004. Target-based discovery of novel herbicides. Current Opinion in Plant Biology 7:219–225.

Ridley SM, Elliott AC, Yeung M, Youle D. 1998. High-throughput screening as a tool for agrochemical discovery: automated synthesis, compound input, assay design and process management. Pestic. Sci. 54:327-337.

Ward E and Bernasconi P. 1999. Target-based discovery of crop protection chemicals. Nature Biotechnol. 17:618-619.