Application of bioinformatics methods in pesticide research and development

Abstract

The use of pesticides is accompanied by a number of environmental and agrotechnological problems. Many pesticides do not degrade and stay in the soil for years and have low selectivity. Massive application of pesticides with non-selective nature of action caused a gradual increase of resistance in pests due to persistent inherited changes in their DNA. This affects the efficiency of growing agricultural plants and pollution of the environment and food. Computational biology methods, which are actively developing all over the world, can help to solve this problem. Despite the fact that in Russia bioinformatics methods are used to study plant genes of animals, metagenomes of microorganisms, there are no own databases and specialized computer applications for such research and pesticide modernization. Development of domestic similar bioinformatics tools is also an urgent task. The article highlights the problem of creating new effective and environmentally friendly pesticides. The methods of bioinformatics that can be used in the research and development of pesticides are given. The stages of creating new pesticides by bioinformatics methods (review of databases, modeling of molecules, modeling of the interaction of a pesticide with a target, prediction of biological activity) are considered. A description is given of the methods for optimizing the molecular framework of pesticides, which is a change in the carbon skeleton in order to search for new active compounds and screen out many similar compounds in the chemical space. Foreign web resources used to assess the presence of pesticidal properties in substances, such as toxicity, metabolism and physico-chemical properties, and their subsequent registration as pesticides are given.