Abstract
In our previous work, compound Y9k, 1-phenethyl-3- (3-(trifluoromethyl) phenyl) urea, displayed significant inhibition activity on root growth of Arabidopsis. To further investigate the application of urea compounds, a series of novel urea derivatives O1-O22 were designed and synthesized. The biological evaluation demonstrated that compounds O3, O11 and O13 exhibited excellent inhibition activity on root growth and the inhibition activity of O13 to the root growth of Arabidopsis was 2 orders of magnitude higher than that of the commercial herbicide clopyralid. Herbicidal activity assessment indicated that O13 displayed significant inhibition activity on weeds, especially in Amaranthus retroflexus. Furthermore, the morphological investigation of the auxin reporter (DR5::GUS) revealed that O13 could significantly enhanced transcriptional activity of auxin response reporter. These results suggested that O13 could be a promising scaffold for the discovery of novel auxin-related herbicide, and showed potentiality in crop protection from weeds.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2017YFD0201300).
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LD, WMT and LSD conceived and designed the experiment; LD, ZKY synthesized the target compounds; LD, HQZ, KKY and XW performed the biological assay and analyzed the data; LD and LSD wrote and reviewed this paper. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
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Du, L., Yang, Z., Zhang, H. et al. Design, Synthesis and Herbicidal Evaluation of Novel Urea Derivatives with Inhibition Activity to Root Growth. J Plant Growth Regul 42, 4063–4072 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00344-022-10867-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00344-022-10867-z