Design of new pesticides

Clavicepspurpurea. Indeed, these natural toxins have given many useful leads in the design of new pesticides, biocides, or drugs. 

In contrast to "pro" compounds of the type described above, a large number of propesticides have also been developed in recent years which were designed on the basis of their anticipated activation in biological systems. In these cases, active compounds were modified by derivatization into products which reverted back to the original compound within the target organism. This kind of approach to the design of new pesticides has many virtues and the most important of these are described briefly as follows. 

Derivatization, therefore, has been widely applied to improve the toxicological properties of known insecticides and this paper will attempt to review accomplishments and discuss possibilities for future strategy for the design of new compounds with this group of pesticides. 

In the course of our attempts dedicated to the search of new pesticides, we were interested in the design of proinsecticides, especially procarbamates which are less toxic to mammalians than the parent carbamates. N-Acyl-N-methyl or N-sulfenyl-N-methyl carbamates derived from Carbofuran or Aldicarbe are quite effective insecticides and are often equal to superior to their parent compound against insects. 

Owen WJ, deBoer GJ. Plant Metabolism and Design of New Selective Herbicides. In, Eighth International Congress of Pesticide Chemistry Options 2000. Ragsdale,... 

This paper will discuss our views on the critical components needed for the successful design of new herbicides using biochemical approaches. This topic has been the subject of a number of recent reports (i-5). ile there have been no commercial successes to date using target-site based approaches, there liaig been a number of near misses, some of which will be describe here, and there is tremendous potential for success in this approach. At Du Pont, we are firmly committed to biochemical approaches to the discovery of novel pesticides and believe that it will ultimately be successful from a commercial standpoint. 

Kovach J, Petzoldt C, Degni J, Tette J (1992) A method to measure the environmental impact of pesticides. New York Food Life Sci Bull 192 2-8 Kropff MJ, Bouma J, Jones JW (2001) System approaches for the design of sustainable agroecosystems. Agric Sys 70 369-393... 

Validation Validation was defined in Section 3. It is the process of evaluating a method, an instrument or other piece of equipment, a standard material, etc. to determine whether it is appropriate for the work at hand and whether it will meet all expectations and needs for a given analysis. For example, an analyst may propose that a new gas chromatograph, one that has a new design of electron capture detector, be used for a certain pesticide analysis performed in the laboratory. A validation process would involve testing the new instrument (alongside the unit currently used in the procedure) with standards and samples used in the analysis to validate whether the new unit will perform up to the standards that have been set for the work. If it can be documented that the quality of the overall analysis by the new instrument meets expectations, then it can be brought "online."... 

Such information has led to explosive growth in the understanding of biochemical processes. Knowledge of metabolism, biosynthetic processes, neurochemistry, regulatory mechanisms, and many other aspects of plant, animal and insect biochemistry has provided a basis on which the mode of action of a pesticide may often be more clearly understood. The exploitation of biological information can lead to the synthesis of a new molecule designed to act at a particular site or block a key step in a biochemical process. 

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