Abstrakt
Our review brings the basic information also about other commercially produced pyrazine herbicides including their mechanism of action as well as survey of patented herbicidal pyrazine derivatives. Special attention will be paid to the series of substituted N-phenylpyrazine-2-carboxamides.
This moiety can form centrosymmetric dimer pairs with the peptidic carboxamido group of some peptides, needed for binding to the receptor site, possibly by formation of hydrogen bonds. All compounds were tested as potential inhibitors of the photosynthetic electron transport in spinach chloroplasts.
Therefore we designed in preference the compounds with the lipophilic and/or electron-withdrawing substituents in the benzene moiety. Based on the obtained results it could be assumed that the biological activity of the studied pyrazinecarboxamides did not depend exclusively on the compound lipophilicity but it was also affected by electron accepting or withdrawing power of the substituents on the aromatic benzene ring.