China丨Intelligent delivery system of pesticide developed by 'Science Island'

Recently, Wu zhengyan and Zhangjia’s team from IIM developed an Acid/Base dual responsive intelligent pesticide delivery system. This technology provides an effective reference for the synthesis and application of pesticides’ carrier materials. And the results have been accepted for publication in Chem Eng.

Pesticides play a leading role in the control of weeds, pests and diseases and it also protect food security. However, traditional pesticides are easy to be lost in the process of field application, and then harm the environment and human health.

In the past few decades, stimulation-responsive controlled release pesticides have attracted much attention in the agricultural field because they can improve the utilization efficiency of pesticides and reduce environmental pollution. Pesticides are mainly composed of active ingredients of pesticides, carriers and functional groups with stimulus responsiveness. They release pesticides through controlling the response to external stimulus and can be released according to the set time, place and quantitative to effectively reduce the excessive use and repeated application of pesticides, to reduce the pollution to the environment, and improve the effective utilization targeting of pesticides.

Light, electricity, magnetism and PH are often used as trigger factors to promote pesticide’s release. Among them, the response of PH has attracted much attention due to the characteristics of simple operation and low cost. However, the single sensitivity of PH may bring some limitations to the application.

To expand the application scenarios, the group designed an Acid/Base dual responsive intelligent pesticide delivery system. The system was composed of two calcium complexes sensitive to Acid and Base and showed good loading capacity of pesticide and controlled release behavior of acid/base dual response. At the same time, the system has excellent foliar adhesion, high temperature resistance and UV resistance, which can not only avoid drug damage and drug loss caused by excessive exposure beyond the threshold of drug activity, also make the drug continue to play its role in the release cycle, to improve the effective utilization rate of pesticide.