My mother has brown eyes and my father and I have green eyes. How does that work? Answer, Mum was a heterozygote. No this is not some deadly disease, it simply means that on one chromosome she has the dominant gene for brown eyes, and on the other she has the recessive green / blue eye gene. Mendelian genetics explains how plants and animals inherit traits from their parents and has been used by AHRI researcher Dr. Roberto Busi to show why it is a good idea to rotate herbicides. This study showed that Sakura® (pyroxasulfone, Zidua® in U.S.A) resistance…

Wearing a seat belt reduces the risk of dying in a car accident. The seat belt is not perfect (people wearing seatbelts can still die in car accidents), however it does reduce the risk, particularly when used in combination with other safety technologies (like airbags). In the same way, rotating herbicides is not perfect, but it does reduce the risk of resistance evolving, especially when combined with other weed management tools. We received a lot of feedback and more research data on this issue since the last edition of AHRI insight, and we decided to follow up with a more…

Are the wheels falling off the concept of herbicide rotation to manage resistant weeds? In recent years new ryegrass herbicides have been released, giving us some hope that there will be a herbicide solution to our problems. Imagine if your ryegrass was resistant to one of these fantastic new herbicides the first time you used it. We have seen this in the past and we may be about to see it again. AHRI researcher Dr Roberto Busi has previously shown us that low herbicide rates is not good practice as it can lead to faster resistance evolution for some herbicides….

If you drove to work at the same time each day and hit a major traffic jam each time, you might consider changing the time you drive to work. It seems that annual ryegrass has also come to the same conclusion. AHRI research by Mechelle Owen has confirmed that greater seed dormancy is positively correlated with higher levels of herbicide resistance in ryegrass. That is, populations of ryegrass with a higher resistance status had higher levels of seed dormancy, and although these traits are not genetically linked, it does allow ryegrass to germinate later to avoid knockdown (burn down) herbicides….