Xanthium sibiricum extract can be used as a new herbicide

Business news on August 6 recently, Shao Hua, Ph.D of Xinjiang Institute of ecology and geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, successfully developed a degradable plant-based herbicide by analyzing and researching the main Allelochemicals of Xanthium italicum Relevant achievements have been published in the international journal Molecular recently, and a patent for herbicide has been successfully applied Xanthium sibiricum, native to North America, is mainly distributed in the middle latitudes of the eastern and western hemispheres It is an annual herb with strong reproductive capacity, which can cause serious damage to corn, cotton, soybean and other crops For the reasons of harm, in addition to the rapid growth of the species, which can compete for the living space of crops, some scholars believe that it can also help "invade" the living space of crops through allelopathy According to reports, plant allelopathy refers to the release of specific secondary biomass to the environment, which has a beneficial or harmful impact on the growth and development of other neighboring plants However, whether the allelopathy can play the role of assisting "invasion" is still controversial in the industry Among them, a "new weapon hypothesis" holds that some invasive plants can inhibit the growth of native plants by producing novel allelochemicals, so that they can take advantage of themselves Shaohua proved this hypothesis by studying Xanthium italicum, an exotic plant Shaohua found that the extracts of Xanthium sibiricum at the concentration of 0.05g/ml could significantly inhibit the growth of the tested plants, among which the extracts of leaves and fruits completely inhibited the seed germination of the tested plants She then used the activity tracing method to separate the strong allelochemicals, xanthan, from the fruits Shao Hua told China Science Daily that the substance can significantly inhibit the growth of monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous plants at a low concentration of 160 micromol / L; when the concentration reaches 800 micromol / L, the inhibition rate of the substance on the root length of the dicotyledonous plant amaranth reaches 78%, on lettuce reaches 89%, on monocotyledonous plant wheat 69%, and on Ryegrass 67% In addition, it was also found that the roots of the tested plants were distorted and brown, indicating that they had been seriously poisoned When the concentration is increased to 4 mmol / L, the substance can cause the seeds of all plants to not germinate at all According to the experts in the industry, the research shows that cangersaponin has the potential to be further developed into a plant-based herbicide that can be degraded in nature.