Conventional herbicides (a class of pesticide that targets weeds) can cause significant environmental harm when overused or mismanaged, yet farmers depend on them to manage unwanted weed growth.
Now, a team in the Center for Genomic Science Innovation and Department of Biochemistry has devised a new approach: “green” herbicides that leverage plants’ own hormones. The patent-pending approach garnered a 2025 WARF Innovation Award, which honors standout discoveries selected from hundreds of invention disclosures.
The team, led by postdoctoral fellow Paige Henning and scientist Ben Minkoff in Mike Sussman’s Lab, has uncovered a powerful new class of natural plant peptide hormones called S-Protein Homologs, or SPHs. From their characterization in the lab, the team devised a patent-pending bioherbicide platform with the potential to transform weed management in agriculture.
Henning joined the lab in 2022 to investigate the receptors for these previously uncharacterized SPH peptides, normally expressed only in reproductive plant tissues. Early experiments revealed striking physiological effects: when applied to Arabidopsis thaliana, SPHs cause severe growth arrest and, at high concentrations, plant death. Because SPHs are expressed only in reproductive tissues, yet trigger such strong responses in vegetative tissue, the team quickly recognized their agricultural value.
Henning and Minkoff used biochemical assays, mutant analyses and mass spectrometry to identify several plant proteins essential for SPH sensitivity. Plants lacking these proteins are resistant to SPH and grow normally. This provided the perfect combination of phenotypes to develop SPH-resistant crop lines.
The resulting invention, now disclosed to WARF, parallels the “Roundup Ready” concept but with a natural and biodegradable twist. SPH peptides function as an organic, naturally occurring and degrading bioherbicide, expected to leave little to no ecological footprint and mitigating potential health hazards at all food chain levels. Because homologs of the target proteins exist across all land plants, the approach can hopefully be applied to numerous staple crops – and be equally effective against a wide spectrum of weeds.
If validated at scale, this system could represent the first universal bioherbicide: a targeted, environmentally gentle weed-control strategy that leaves minimal ecological footprint and poses low risk across the food chain.