Australia
February 3, 2016
Two years ago, a meeting was held in Australia to gather researchers who study weed, pest and disease resistance to see what they could learn from each other.
There was a mind-blowing moment when an entomologist realised that the P450 enzymes he had been studying that gave resistance to an insecticide were the same as those that a weed researcher was studying that caused resistance to a herbicide (well… we thought it was mind-blowing. But then again, we’re weeds geeks!).
Some new research by Jenna Malone, Chris Preston and others from the University of Adelaide weed research team have found that glyphosate resistant brome grass in Australia has the same resistance mechanism as glyphosate resistant Pigweed in the USA.
We’ll admit it’s not quite as mind-blowing as insects and weeds sharing the resistance mechanism. BUT it’s still pretty amazing that very different weeds (on opposite sides of the globe) have evolved the same resistance mechanism.
Glyphosate kills plants by ‘knocking out’ the EPSPS enzyme. These glyphosate resistant brome grass have about 20-fold the number of copies of the EPSPS gene as a normal plant resulting in 5-fold glyphosate resistance.
Glyphosate can still knock out some of this enzyme, but the plant has produced so much of the enzyme that there’s plenty leftover for normal plant growth and the plant survives normal field rates of glyphosate.
This mechanism is called gene amplification.
Want to learn a little more about this mechanism? We've got a short video for you to explains how it works.
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