The introduction of fluorine atom can increase the biological activities of the target compounds remarkably. To find more safe and efficient insecticides, natural product galegine as lead compound, a series of novel fluorinated galegine analogues were designed and synthesized. The bioassay results indicate that all the target compounds have moderate to high insecticidal activities against Hyalopterus pruni Geoffroy and Aphis gossypii Glover, in particular, compounds IIa-05, IId-02 and IIe-03 show the best insecticidal activities against Hyalopterus pruni with the mortality of 100%, 100% and 96.6%, respectively. And compounds IIa-02, IId-02, IId-04, IIc-01, IIc-02 and IId-01 show 0.6-7 times insecticidal activities against Aphis gossypii as Imidacloprid with their LC50 values are 0.28 mg/L, 0.38 mg/L, 0.33 mg/L, 0.09 mg/L, 0.03 mg/L and 0.12 mg/L, respectively The analysis of structure-activity relationship indicates that the compounds with difluoro-substituted benzene ring have more potent insecticidal activities than the single fluoro-substituted compounds.
Keywords: Galegine; aphids; fluorine atom; insecticidal activity; synthesis.