Alyssa Essman, assistant professor in the Department of Horticulture and Crop Science at Ohio State University, has been researching integrated weed management strategies and how cover crops can be used to supplement conventional herbicide programs.

After exposing more than 70 million grain amaranth seeds to a soil-based herbicide, researchers were not able to find a single herbicide-resistant mutant. Though preliminary, the findings suggest that the mutation rate in amaranth is very low, and that low-level herbicide application contributes little — if anything — to the onset of new mutations conferring resistance.