Biotechnology approaches to developing herbicide tolerance/selectivity in crops

Abstract

The use of herbicides has revolutionized weed control in many crop production systems. However, with the
increasing development of weed resistances to many popular selective herbicides, the need has arisen to rethink the
application of chemical weed control. Approaches to maintain the efficiency of chemical weed control include the
discovery of new herbicide target sites in plants and the discovery/ synthesis of new, more potent herbicidal
molecules. However, these approaches are expensive to execute, take considerably long times to succeed and may
lead to increased chemical loads in the environment. Since many existing broad-spectrum herbicides are still
effective, an alternative strategy adopted to ensure the safe use of broad-spectrum herbicides in a wide range of
crops is the application of biotechnological techniques to engineer crop selectivity to these herbicides. In this review
we summarize efforts being made to develop crop herbicide selectivity using biotechnology.