March 16, 2021 |
Distant cousins of cultivated potato may hold the key to unlocking new sources of resistance to the tuber crop’s most devastating disease, late blight.
That’s the hope of a team of USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists affiliated with the University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS), 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.
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. 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, who is also an honorary associate in the CALS Department of Plant Pathology.