Agrochemical research and development in the 21(st) century: Bloom or bust

Economic, environmental, and political issues arising in the last two decad es have changed agricultural practice worldwide. While the agrochemical mar ket has diminished, time and cost of R & D and regulatory restrictions have increased, thereby reducing profit margins dramatically. This has led to a change of strategy from screening whole organisms to screening diverse com pounds, with high-throughput screening processes similar to those used in d rug discovery. For large-scale high-throughput screening to efficiently fac ilitate storage, retrieval, preparation and tracking of compounds, the samp le management process needs to be highly automated. The introduction of mod ern automated technology will help to address the problems faced by the agr ochemical industry.