Location: Natural Products Utilization Research
Project Number: 6060-30400-001-000-D
Project Type: In-House Appropriated
Start Date: Sep 1, 2025
End Date: Aug 31, 2030
Objective:
Objective 1: Discover bioherbicides from natural products with novel modes of action (MoA) that are highly efficacious and cost effective for managing weeds.
Subobjective 1.1: Discovery of novel phytotoxins from microbial and plant sources for potential use as herbicides in weed management.
Subobjective 1.2: Elucidation of the modes of action for bioactive compounds through conventional methods and new advanced techniques.
Objective 2: Produce plant incorporated protectant-based bioherbicides by increasing or imparting the production of an allelochemical (natural herbicide) through genetic manipulation in major agronomic crops.
Subobjective 2.1: Deployment of recently identified sorgoleone ABCG transporter for enhancement of sorgoleone rhizosecretion in transformed plants.
Subobjective 2.2: Increasing metabolite pools and addressing rate-limiting steps of sorgoleone biosynthesis to achieve optimal production levels in planta.
Subobjective 2.3: Testing additional crop species with sorgoleone as plant incorporated pesticide: moving complete sorgoleone biosynthetic pathway and associated transport components into maize, wheat, soybean, cotton and canola.
Approach:
NP resources (bacteria, fungi, plants) are largely untapped and offer a large diversity of phytotoxic compounds that are novel in structure and MoA. Objective 1 seeks to discover herbicides from NPs with novel MoAs through data-driven approaches. Extracts from the National Center for Natural Product Research repository and other sources will be screened in herbicidal bioassays to determine their phytotoxicity. Omics techniques (plant phenomics, metabolomics, and transcriptomics) will be used to quantify the biomolecules and molecular processes that contribute to the MoA of the phytotoxic NPs. Objective 2 seeks to produce plant incorporated protectant-based bioherbicides by increasing or imparting the production of an allelochemical through genetic manipulation in major agronomic crops (corn, soybean, and wheat). Molecular and biochemical approaches will be utilized to evaluate the performance of sorghum-derived transgenes incorporated into transgenic crops and quantify engineered allelochemical production. High-impact research focused on discovering new NP herbicides is imperative for global food security and economics, ensuring our stakeholders continue to produce high yielding, high quality nutritious crops for a growing world population.