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The Roundup family was born in 1974. Since then products based on glyphosate have become the most widely used herbicides in the world. The benign nature of the molecule to operators and the environment, combined with excellence in weed control, make it first choice for nonselective weed control.
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Mode Of Action
Once applied to the leaf, uptake occurs within 1-6 hours and glyphosate moves through the phloem both downwards and upwards within 5 days. It tends to accumulate in the growing points, then evens up throughout the plant, leading to a gradual loss of green colour followed by death between one and four weeks later.
Glyphosate works at a single specific site in the Shikimic acid pathway to inhibit the production of the aminoacids
phenylalanine, tryptophan and
tyrosine. Amino-acids are the building
blocks of protein molecules and once
the biochemical pathway is blocked the
synthesis of proteins is interrupted and
the plant effectively starves to death.
The process is temperature related and
explains why treated plants take some
time to die.
Enviromentally Friendly
This metabolic pathway is present only
in green plants. Higher forms of life like
mammals, birds, fish and insects
neither absorb nor metabolise
glyphosate. This is the reason Roundup
has such environmentally friendly
characteristics.
No other class of commercial herbicide
is known to target this site (HRAC
group G).
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Glyphosate Formulations
All glyphosate products are not same.
While they all contain the active
ingredient, glyphosate, the formulation
type in which the glyphosate is carried
plays a major role in performance.
Glyphosate is glyphosate as far as the
plant is concerned, once inside the
plant it works by interfering with protein
production and causing a slow death
by starvation. But getting glyphosate
into the plant is the difficult part.
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