A CONTRACEPTIVE spray for plants is being developed that could eradicate certain weeds from farmers鈥� fields and cut herbicide use.
Ed Newbigin of Melbourne University and colleagues at CSIRO, Australia鈥檚 national research organisation, are planning to exploit the mechanism that prevents certain plants self-fertilising. They want to target the 鈥渟elf-incompatibility鈥� (SI) receptor present on the stigma of some plant species, which blocks self-pollination by binding to a pollen protein specific to that individual plant.
The team is developing a molecule that will bind to the SI receptor in wild radish, a weed that infests barley, wheat and rape (canola). This will prevent seeds from forming, so the weed will die out. Because the wild radish鈥檚 SI mechanism is unique to its family of plants, the spray would have no effect on grain crops such as barley and wheat, which have no SI mechanism at all.
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鈥淲e aim to use this approach the same way people in wildlife management use contraceptives to control wildlife populations,鈥� says Newbigin.
