1/20/2024 0 Comments Late blight of potato management![]() ![]() ![]() In addition to adapting to diverse growing conditions, many wild potato species boast formidable defenses against diseases like late blight. "Although most wild species make small potatoes that you would not want to eat-they could actually make you pretty sick-they exist in harsh natural environments without fertilizer, irrigation or pesticides," noted Halterman in an educational video on his efforts.ĪRS research associate Hari Karki prepares to make crosses in order to move late blight resistance from a wild species into cultivated potato. In collaboration with ARS scientist Shelley Jansky (retired) and ARS research associate Hari Karki, Halterman set his sights on the hard-scrabble relatives of cultivated potato growing wild in Central and South America, and Mexico, where late blight originated and co-evolved with the plant, a member of the nightshade family. There, Halterman specializes in the genetic "arms race" that potato plants engage in with the pathogens that attack and sicken them, often forcing growers to retaliate with chemical controls like fungicide that can ratchet up production costs and concerns over environmental harm. In susceptible varieties, the fungus-like pathogen causes dark lesions and other disease symptoms that rapidly destroy the plant's leaves, stem, fruit or tubers, noted Dennis Halterman, a plant geneticist with the ARS Vegetable Crops Research Unit in Madison, Wisconsin. Late blight remains a worldwide threat today to not only potato, but also tomato crops, inflicting an estimated $6.7 billion annually in yield losses and control costs. ![]() That's the hope of a team of Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists, who conducted laboratory trials in which they exposed the leaves of 72 different species of wild potato to spores of the late blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans-the same culprit that triggered the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. Wild Potatoes Tapped for Late Blight Guard DutyĮmail: cousins of cultivated potato may hold the key to unlocking new sources of resistance to the tuber crop's most devastating disease, late blight. ![]()
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