Chemicals Helping Plants Defend Themselves Could Replace Pesticides

A new research published in Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters has identified five chemicals that trigger the defense mechanism of rice plants to ward off the white-backed planthopper, a common rice pest.

Plants have natural self-defense mechanisms that can be switched on using chemicals that are not harmful to the environment, and are not toxic to insects or their natural enemies. In the study, researchers from Zhejiang University in China used a specially designed screening system to determine the different chemicals that switched on the plants' defense mechanism. The team designed and synthesized 29 phenoxyalkanoic acid derivatives, and identified five that could be effective at triggering the rice plants to defend themselves.

"We demonstrate for the first time that some phenoxyalkanoic acid derivatives have the potential to become such plant protection agents against the rice white-backed planthopper," said Dr. Yonggen Lou, one of the authors of the study and professor at Zhejiang University.

For more, read the Alpha Galileo news release.