Articles
DOES THE RESEARCH ON PLANT PHENOLS HOLD OUT PROSPECTS IN INTEGRATED PLANT PRODUCTION? – AN INDUSTRY VIEW
The most important aspect of industry’s role here is to target its research and development activities fully towards finding new crop protection agents which combat diseases and pests effectively with minimal harm to both non-target organisms and to the environment.
The constraints now placed on successfully registering and marketing a new crop protection agent are so great that industry looks everywhere in identifying potential new projects.
One source which has long been of interest has been the field of natural products.
The amazing variety of chemical structures produced by natural systems stimulates the research chemist in his search for bioactive molecules.
Since many of them have been produced by organisms with the specific function of interacting with metabolic pathways (e.g. in signalling or in disarming competitors), it is supposed that the chances of a natural product becoming a lead for a crop protection agent with the specificity now demanded are higher than in the case of random screening of synthetic chemicals.
It is wrong to suppose that the chemist is interested in natural products because they are intrinsically less toxic than synthetic ones.
This is simply not true.
Many natural products are synthesized by organisms as toxins or for defence purposes and are highly toxic, even relatively mundane products produced by plants in large quantities, such as the commoner flavonoids, are often more toxic than modern synthetic crop protection agents and it is difficult to suppose that industry would be permitted to market them if they were tested according to the rules now applied by the registration authorities.
The specific environmental advantages of natural products is more likely to be a feature of their tending to be easily degraded.
Industry’s main interest in natural products, including phenolics, thus has been as a source of lead compounds to be optimized by chemists to produce the final