Leptospermone is a chemical compound (a β-triketone) produced by some members of the myrtle family (Myrtaceae), such as Callistemon citrinus (Lemon Bottlebrush), a shrub native to Australia, and Leptospermum scoparium (Manuka), a New Zealand tree from which it gets its name. Modification of this allelopathic chemical to produce mesotrione led to the commercialization of derivative compounds as HPPD inhibitor herbicides.
Leptospermone is a chemical compound (a β-triketone) produced by some members of the myrtle family (Myrtaceae), such as Callistemon citrinus (Lemon Bottlebrush), a shrub native to Australia, and Leptospermum scoparium (Manuka), a New Zealand tree from which it gets its name. Modification of this allelopathic chemical to produce mesotrione led to the commercialization of derivative compounds as HPPD inhibitor herbicides.
==History== Leptospermone was first identified in 1927 and was extracted from a variety of plants in 1965, 1966 and 1968. It was first identified as a chemical in Callistemon citrinus in California in 1977. A biologist at the Western Research Centre of Stauffer Chemical Company noticed that very few plants grew under Callistemon citrinus bushes. After taking soil samples and creating an array of extracts, one was identified as an herbicide. While it did have herbicidal effects, the rate required for sufficient coverage was too high to be of practical use.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).