Australia
February 7, 2017
Previously on ‘Pre-emergent: A tale of four herbicides’...
In Episode 1, ‘Cross-resistant monster’, AHRI researcher Roberto Busi turned to the dark side and evolved Sakura resistance in the lab, and then found this had caused cross-resistance to Boxer® and Avadex®, creating the world’s most wanted criminal ryegrass population.
In Episode 2, Busi teamed up with Todd Gaines and Martin Vila-Aiub. They found that the criminal ryegrass could share its resistance trait by passing on just one single gene. Fortunately, they found that this gene was semi-dominant. View it here!
In Episode 3, Busi corrects his evil ways and uses the insecticide phorate to switch off P450 enzymes, but this only worked for some herbicides, chlorsulfuron and trifluralin.
Now in the final episode...
The evil Busi proclaims ‘I'm not a bad person, I'm not trying to create a monster, I just found something really bad and felt that I should tell you about it’.
The naysayers said, 'sure, just tell us when it happens in real life, then we'll believe you!'.
Well, guess what, it happened!
Canadian researchers Mangin, Hall and Beckie have found wild oats that are resistant to Avadex®, and have never been sprayed with Sakura®, were found to be Sakura® resistant.
This confirms what Roberto Busi found in the lab in ryegrass has now happened in the field with wild oats. In both cases, metabolic resistance is suspected.
This is big news for two reasons.
1. This is the first document field evolved cross-resistance to Sakura®
2. Wils oats are known to evolve resistance very slowly compared to ryegrass
Busi wasn't evil after all! He was just a misunderstood scientist. What's clear is that metabolic resistance is a significant threat to many of a pre-emergent grass herbicides and we need to use excellent management to keep them working for as long as we can.
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Do you like leathermans? You may not love surveys, but I bet you'd love to win a Leatherman Multi-Tool! We're running an agronomy survey on herbicide rates. It's short and sweet, we promise, and it'll really help us out if you fill it out! Thank you in advance ;-)
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