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NW illinois | I am currently a senior Ag science major and am currently taking a weeds class. Today we were discussing methods that crops, such as corn, use to deactivate an herbicide to prevent the herbicide from killing it. For those of you that do not understand what I mean by deactivation, a crop has 4 different methods that it uses to deactivate an herbicide to avoid its toxic effects. these include inhibiting normal binding sites, chemical binding, chemical reaction, and genetic alteration. That got me to thinking: What do glyphosate resistant weeds such as waterhemp use to to deactivate the glyphosate. My professor said that some scientists think the waterhemp plant has either genetically modified itself to deactivate glyphosate or has had the gene to deactivate glyphosate all along and the plant has used natural selection to weed out the plants that do not have the resistance gene. Scientists seem to be leaning heavily towards genetic alteration. This is all somewhat over my head, so I didn't know if any of you have heard of some research being done on this subject? | |
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glyphosate resistant weeds.
