Researchers have discovered a new chemical that selectively kills harmful nematodes with a much lower risk of toxicity to humans and other creatures.
The most abundant animals on farms—and everywhere on land, in fact—are microscopic worms called nematodes. Some kinds benefit the soil, but others parasitize crops, inflicting more than $100 billion in losses worldwide each year. Although pesticides can get rid of harmful nematodes, they inflict collateral damage on other life.
Farmers try to prevent nematode damage in various ways. Rotating crops, sterilizing soil with plastic sheets, and planting nematode-resistant crop varieties can all help control the problem, but the most effective solution is treating fields with pesticides. Yet most of the widely used chemicals known to kill nematodes have been banned because of their toxicity to humans and wildlife.
In 2016, a compound that passed those tests caught Burns’s interest. Its chemical structure resembled a drug called levamisole, which is used to treat livestock infected with parasitic nematodes, but the compound had different effects on the worms. Levamisole paralyzes them, whereas the newly discovered small molecule—dubbed selectivin—kills them outright.
This “bioactivation” of the chemicals didn’t happen in other kinds of organisms tested, perhaps because their versions of cytochrome P450 deal with it safely, which suggests it would be nontoxic to humans, wildlife, and soil microorganisms. A structurally similar molecule, which kills slugs and snails that would otherwise eat crops. Some farmers also release certain kinds of beneficial nematodes to control insect pests, which the worms infect and kill.
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