Abamectin

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A chemical compound used as an insecticide and acaricide to control pests on crops and livestock by disrupting their nervous system functions
2. A pharmaceutical agent applied in agriculture and veterinary medicine to eliminate mites and insects through neurotoxic effects that paralyze prey
3. A macrocyclic lactone derivative employed to manage parasite infestations in plants and animals by interfering with nerve signal transmission in invertebrates

Etymology: Abamectin is a modern coinage rather than an ancient word, and its name is a compound of a shortened Greek-derived prefix and a chemical name. It is a pesticide discovered in the late 1970s and early 1980s by researchers at Merck, working from soil bacteria of the genus Streptomyces. The bacterium's fermentation products were a family of compounds called avermectins, and the name abamectin was given to a mixture of them, with "ab-" reflecting the "a" for avermectin and "b" marking the second component of the mixture. The "-mectin" ending was devised for the whole family and comes from "avermectin" itself, which combines "aver-", a nod to the Merck-funded Avermectin research (sometimes linked to the phrase "a vermin" or "vermin killer"), with "-mectin", a suffix from the Latin "mectinus", the family name given to compounds with anti-parasitic action. Because the term is a late twentieth-century technical coinage, it has no older history in English beyond the chemistry of the 1970s and 1980s.

Synonyms: avermectin