Background: Plant viruses cause many serious plant diseases and are currently suppressed with the simultaneous use of virucides and insecticides. The use of such materials, however, increases the amounts of pollutants in the environment. To reduce environmental contaminants, virucides with insecticidal activity is an attractive option. Results: A series of substituted ferulic acid amide derivatives 7 and the corresponding hydrogenated ferulic acid amide derivatives 13 were synthesized and evaluated for their antiviral and insecticidal activities. The majority of the synthesized compounds exhibited good levels of antiviral activity against the tobacco mosaic virus (TMW), with compounds 7a, 7b and 7d in particular providing higher levels of protective and curative activities against TMV at 500 μg/mL than the control compound ribavirin. Furthermore, these compounds displayed good insecticidal activities against insects with piercing-sucking mouthparts, which can spread plant viruses between and within crops. Conclusions: Two series of ferulic acid derivatives have been synthesized efficiently. The bioassay showed title compounds not only inhibit the plant viral infection, but also prevented the spread of plant virus by insect vectors. These findings therefore demonstrate that the ferulic acid amides represent a new template for future antiviral studies.

Background: Culex is an important mosquito as vectors for the transmission of serious diseases, such as filariasis, West Nile virus, dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya and other encephalitides. Nearly one billion people in the developing countries are at risk. In order to discover new bioactive molecules and pesticides acting on mosquito, we designed active amide structure and synthesized a series of novel diamide derivatives. Results: A series of novel diamide derivatives were designed and synthesized. Their structures were characterized by ¹ H NMR, FTIR and HRMS. The single crystal structure of compound 6n was determined to further elucidate the structure. Biological activities of these compounds were tested. Most of them exhibited higher mosquito larvicidal activity. Especially compound 6r displayed relatively good activity to reach 70% at 2 μg/mL. Conclusion: A practical synthetic route to amide derivatives by the reaction of amide with another acid is presented. This study suggests that the diamide derivatives exhibited good effective against mosquito.

In order to identify novel chlorantraniliprole derivatives as potential insecticides or fungicides, 25 analogues of chlorantraniliprole were synthesized. The insecticidal activities against oriental armyworm and the antifungal activities against five typical fungi of these derivatives were tested. Compounds 2u, 2x and 2y exhibited good activities against oriental armyworm, especially compounds 2u and 2x which showed higher larvicidal activities than indoxacarb. Moreover, all of the tested compounds exhibited activities against five typical fungi. The Ki values of all synthesized compounds were calculated using AutoDock4. The relationship between the Ki values and the results of insecticidal activities against oriental armyworm further indicated that the membrane-spanning domain protein of the ryanodine receptor might contain chlorantraniliprole binding sites.