Scientists are reporting a key advance toward development of a way to combat the terrible plant diseases that caused the Irish potato famine（饥荒，饥饿） and still inflict¹（造成，遭受） billions of dollars of damage to crops each year around the world. Their study appears in ACS' bi-weekly journal Organic Letters. Teck-Peng Loh and colleagues point out that the Phytophthora fungi² cause extensive damage to food crops such as potatoes and soybeans（大豆，黄豆） as well as to ornamental³ plants（观赏植物） like azaleas（杜鹃花） and rhododendrons（杜鹃花） . One species of the fungus⁴ caused the Irish potato famine in the mid⁵ 1840s. That disaster resulted in nearly one million deaths from starvation and forced millions more people to flee Ireland for the United States and other countries. Still difficult to control despite the use of modern pesticides⁶, the fungus continues to cause $6 billion in damage to global potato crops annually⁷. Scientists, however, have isolated⁸ a key hormone⁹, alpha-1, that allows Phytophthora to reproduce. The hormone exists in several different forms, and a synthetic¹⁰ version of the most biologically active form could provide the basis for developing a way to control the fungus and reduce its threat, the scientists suggest.

They describe an advance toward this goal, the synthesis of a particularly active form of the mating hormone called (3R,7R,11R,15R)-hormone alpha-1. The scientists also showed that they could make relatively¹¹ large quantities of the hormone. The advance could open the door to an effective method to fight this ancient scourge¹², they suggest.