25 September 1995 Monsanto Best Paper Award To Lincoln

Lincoln University Post Doctoral Fellow Farhad Dastgheib of the Department of Plant Science has received a top international award for the best paper presented at the 15th Asia-Pacific Weed Science Society Conference, held recently in Tsukubsa, Japan.

Dr Dastgheib won the Monsanto International Award for a paper, co-authored with Professor Roger Field of Lincoln University, entitled "Calculating Chlorsulfuron Concentration in Plants: an approach for detecting the mechanism of herbicide sensitivity".

Monsanto's Christchurch-based Product Development Manager, Murray Willocks, who was at the conference, said that judging scientific papers was always a difficult task but Dr Dastgheib's paper stood out instantly as a potential winner.

Dr Dastgheib received a number of commendations at the conference for his work and he was involved with two other co-authored papers - "Germination Characteristics of Horehound Marrubium vulgare" (with Professor Field) and "Response of Chlorsulfuron Resistant Rape Seed Mutants to Acetolactate Synthase Inhibitors" (with Professor Field and Dr Tony Conner of the Crop and Food Research Institute).

Farhad, originally from Iran, graduated PhD from Lincoln in 1994 with a dissertation entitled "Response of Wheat Cultivars to Chlorsulfuron and the effect of nitrogen availability".

Chlorsulfuron is a sulphonyl urea herbicide used for the control of broadleaf weeds in cereals.

Ian Collins, Journalist, Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand.