Can amino acid also be developed as pesticide against plant viruses?

Added on 10 March 2022

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Can amino acid also be developed as pesticide against plant viruses?

Plant viruses create a great variety of harm. Virus disease pandemics and epidemics are estimated to have a global economic impact in the tens of billions of dollars. At present, there are not many effective and satisfactory varieties of anti-plant virus agents in practical use, and especially few therapeutic agents.

In the face of the harm viruses cause to agricultural production, it is necessary to develop environmentally friendly anti-plant virus drugs. It is increasingly important, and a growing research focus, to find drug candidates from natural products. Natural products possess many of the properties that can make them useful drug candidates, including structural diversity, specificity and novel modes of action. However, natural products also have some disadvantages, such as limited compound availability, high structural complexity and poor drug-likeness. Therefore, pesticide creation based on natural products has become an important direction of green pesticide creation.

Tryptophan is one of the essential amino acids and the biosynthetic precursor of many alkaloids. Prof. Qingmin Wang and Dr. Hongjian Song from Nankai University previously found that tryptophan, the biosynthesis precursor of Peganum harmala alkaloids, and its derivatives have anti-TMV activity both in vitro and in vivo. Further exploration of this led to the identification of NK0238 as a highly effective agent for the prevention and control of diseases caused by plant viruses, but the existing routes are unsuitable for its large-scale synthesis.

They optimized a route for two-step synthesis of this virucide candidate. The optimized route provides a solid foundation for its large-scale synthesis and subsequent efficacy and toxicity studies. Field experiment results showed that it had good effect on multiple plant viruses. The oral toxicity in rats was mild, and it had no effect on the safety of birds, fish or bees. The study entitled "Route development, antiviral studies, field evaluation and toxicity of an antiviral plant protectant NK0238" is published on the Journal of Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering in 2022.