TY  - JOUR
A1  - Staiger, Simona
A1  - Seufert, Pascal
A1  - Arand, Katja
A1  - Burghardt, Markus
A1  - Popp, Christian
A1  - Riederer, Markus
T1  - The permeation barrier of plant cuticles: uptake of active ingredients is limited by very long-chain aliphatic rather than cyclic wax compounds
JF  - Pest Management Science
N2  - BACKGROUND: The barrier to diffusion of organic solutes across the plant cuticle is composed of waxes consisting of very long-chain aliphatic (VLCA) and, to varying degrees, cyclic compounds like pentacyclic triterpenoids. The roles of both fractions in controlling cuticular penetration by organic solutes, e.g. the active ingredients (AI) of pesticides, are unknown to date. We studied thepermeabilityof isolated leaf cuticularmembranes from Garcinia xanthochymus andPrunus laurocerasus for lipophilic azoxystrobin and theobromine as model compounds for hydrophilic AIs.

RESULTS: The wax of P. laurocerasus consists of VLCA (12%) and cyclic compounds (88%), whereas VLCAs make up 97% of the wax of G. xanthochymus.We showthat treating isolated cuticles with methanol almost quantitatively releases the cyclic fraction while leaving the VLCA fraction essentially intact. All VLCAs were subsequently removed using chloroform. In both species, the permeance of the two model compounds did not change significantly after methanol treatment, whereas chloroform extraction had a large effect on organic solute permeability.

CONCLUSION: The VLCA wax fractionmakes up the permeability barrier for organic solutes, whereas cyclic compounds even in high amounts have a negligible role. This is of significance when optimizing the foliar uptake of pesticides.
KW  - cuticular permeability
KW  - active ingredients
KW  - very long-chain aliphatic compounds
KW  - cyclic compounds
KW  - pesicicles
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-204778
VL  - 75
IS  - 12
ER  -