Blight Research

We have a contract with the Potato Council Ltd (PCL) to work on the British population of the blight pathogen, Phytophthora infestans.  Working within the Fight Against Blight initiative of PCL, we isolated the pathogen from 99 sites in Scotland, England and Wales in 2005 and found that mating type A2, formerly a rare type, occurred at 38% of sites sampled. 

Fingerprinting of isolates showed that new strains of blight had appeared and resistance to the systemic fungicide metalaxyl had increased particularly amongst the A2 strains.  The increase in A2 mating type means that mating between A1 and A2 isolates must be more common in the field and the resistant oospores produced by mating might be surviving in the soil over many years to infect new crops.  Because oospores are a product of sex, they give rise to new strains when they germinate. Experiments on the production and survival of oospores are in progress at Henfaes Research Centre and should indicate the risk involved when sexual mating takes place (see link to Poster, below).  New strains produced will be compared with parental strains to determine if they are more or less damaging to the potato crop.

Links
Euroblight (A European network of scientists and other specialists working on potato late blight).
www.euroblight.net.
Potato Council PCL (Supporting The British Potato Industry).
www.potato.org.uk.

Posters
View PowerPoint Poster (840kb - link opens in a new window).

P. infestans can be isolated and grown on antibiotic agar by plating fragments of infected leaves.

In this study of infection in the field, Dr Zoltan Nagy plots dispersal of marked strains of blight at Nantlle, N. Wales 

Research Assistant, Conny Bufe inspects plants for evidence of blight infection from oospores present in the soil     Henfaes Research Centre