The sun beats down your neck as you walk through your weed-littered bean field. Just weeks ago, you had sprayed herbicide. Yet the weeds have made themselves known, wreaking havoc on yields — not to mention your pride.
Pat Tranel, professor and associate head in the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois knows the burden of herbicide resistance all too well. Tranel studies non-target-site herbicide resistance in his research of waterhemp.
Tranel’s team has unearthed the genetic code sequencing for the enzymes released in non-target-site herbicides.
“A lot of times, we know a trait is controlled by two genes,” he says. “But does that mean both genes are equally important, or one gene is 90% responsible, and the other gene is 10%? That’s part of what we’re looking at in the genetic architecture of a trait: the number of genes, where they are, and the relative importance of these different genes.”
In his research at the University of Illinois, Tranel explained he hopes to develop an assay farmers can utilize to tell if their waterhemp is resistant to a particular chemical.
“Now we know the genes responsible are somewhere in these two small regions of the genome,” Tranel says. “We’ve come to an intermediary step to eventually developing an assay that growers can use to determine whether or not they should be spraying a certain chemistry. “That’s why we need to unravel this further to come up with better, more informed strategies to mitigate non-target-site resistance.”
