Lethal hydroxyl radical production in paraquat-treated plants.

Bipyridinium herbicides, including paraquat and diquat, are believed to act by generating highly reactive, oxygen-centered free radicals within chloroplasts when treated plants are exposed to sunlight. This hypothesis has not yet been confirmed by direct chemical measurements of specific free radicals. We studied paraquat-treated plants using a new method able to detect and quantify formation of highly reactive and deleterious hydroxyl radicals (HO(*)), in which dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is used as a molecular probe. DMSO is oxidized by HO(*) to form the stable, nonradical compound, methane sulfinic acid, which can be easily extracted from plant tissue and measured spectrophotometrically. Initial experiments revealed formation of extraordinary numbers of hydroxyl radicals in light-exposed, paraquat + DMSO-treated plants, equivalent at least to the cumulative number of HO(*) radicals per gram of fresh tissue that would be produced by 10,000 rads of gamma irradiation. This appears to be the greatest production of hydroxyl radicals yet observed in a biological system and is quite sufficient to explain the rapid death of top growth in paraquat-treated plants.