ABSTRACT
Herbicide-tolerant crops offer a favorable alternative to the traditional approach of identifying and developing new crop herbicides. Herbicide-tolerant crop varieties can also overcome the effects of residual herbicide activity on subsequent plants in a crop rotation. Herbicide-tolerant crop plants can provide a multitude of new weed control and marketing opportunities. The decision to introduce novel tolerance factors into a crop would depend on the assessment of these opportunities for both the crop and the herbicide for which novel tolerance can be introduced. The imidazolinones are very effective in controlling cruciferous weeds. As such, imidazolinone-tolerant canola offers the potential for significantly better weed control than is provided by some canola herbicides. The chapter provides an example of characteristics associated with imidazolinone-tolerant crops. Other crops with imidazolinone tolerance are expected to exhibit similar characteristics, provided they employ the same mechanism of tolerance as the tolerant corn.
