Taking Advantage of a Sustainable Forest Resource in Agriculture: A Value-Added Application of Volatile Turpentine Analogues as Botanical Pesticides Based on Amphipathic Modification and QSAR Study

As a continuous study on the integrated application of volatile β-pinene as an abundant bioresource, the further and broader activity assessment of β-pinene analogues was necessary. On the basis of previous research, the larvicidal activities were carried out against two agricultural insect pests Plutella xylostella and Mythimna separata. In accordance with the overall insecticidal effect, it was remarkable that compounds 5k and 5l demonstrated extreme activity, with LC 50 values 1.846 and 1.621 μg/mL against Plutella xylostella . The preliminary structure–activity relationship (SAR) was analyzed, and compounds with the appropriate amphipathic feature displayed more desirable performance. In the meantime, the quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSAR) model ( R 2 = 0.9485, F = 82.94, S 2 = 0.0067) was built. The model indicated the most important structural feature was the μ c value, which represented the total hybridization components of the molecular dipole. The work provided a potential and alternative approach to take advantage of a forest resource in agriculture.