Discovery of fungicide flubeneteram

Succinate dehydrogenase (SDH) is one of the important fungicide targets. However, many plant pathogens showed medium and even high resistance to commercial fungicides targeting upon SDH. So, it is very urgent to design new novel inhibitor for SDH. Pharmacophore-linked fragment virtual screening (PFVS) is a high-throughput drug discovery approach independent of biophysical screening techniques and flubeneteram, a novel fungicide candidate targeting SDH, was successfully obtained by PFVS. Here, the development process of the fungicide flubeneteram was analyzed in detail, including the principle of PFVS, the discovery of lead compounds, the modification of substituents and the fungicidal activity. The discovery process of flubeneteram would provide novel ideas and methods for pesticide researchers.