Investment

The worsening problem of widespread herbicide resistance has been caused by the lack of diversity and overuse of the limited number of available herbicide modes of action (MOA) - that is, the enzyme or biological activity the herbicide targets. Herbicide resistance affects yield and crop productivity, resulting in profit losses to farmers. Thus, there is a need to find compounds with novel herbicide MOAs that can help manage weeds economically and sustainably. One promising approach is to look at fungal natural products (NPs) as they can have MOAs not found in synthetic herbicides.

Fungal plant pathogens have evolved powerful NPs that target plants over millions of years, providing a treasure trove of herbicide molecules. However, many of these NPs are also toxic to the producing fungi, resulting in the evolution of resistance genes to counter this self-toxicity. A resistance gene is found close to the genes that encode the toxic NP in the fungal genomes and act as a signpost of the NP's MOA. Rationally searching for these resistance genes that are novel herbicide MOAs using a strategy called "resistance gene-directed genome mining" means we can not only pinpoint the location of the herbicidal NP within the fungus' genome, but we can also engineer "herbicide-ready" crops with the identified resistance gene. Other genome mining strategies, such as transcriptomics of fungal plant pathogens during infection, can also help us discover NPs with herbicide activity.

The project aims to increase the herbicide arsenal made available to farmers using these genome mining strategies to find NPs with novel herbicide MOAs in fungi. If the discoveries are successful, the aim is to engineer herbicide-ready crops resistant to the discovered herbicides. The project's impact is building the foundation for further interdisciplinary research into herbicide discovery and development, such as NP-inspired synthetic herbicides, and providing farmers more options when dealing with weed control to help increase crop productivity and profits.