Category: Breeding

There’s a bit of an argy-bargy developing in the comments to Robert’s provocative post Inorganic farming. Anastasia raised the question of transgenics for fungal resistance, which Robert echoed. Patrick then waded in bullishly to ask why transgenics were needed, when breeder Tom Wagner “has created quite a number of potato lines totally resistant to late blight”. And that created a clamour from Robert to the effect that he couldn’t find any evidence of Wagner’s success on this front.

Two points.

First, although Patrick was perhaps too modest to say so, he has arranged for Tom Wagner to be at a meeting in Oxford, England, as part of a Greater European Tour that Tom is undertaking in the autumn. So anyone who wants to know about his selections for late blight resistance can get it straight from the horse’s mouth. And report it here, please.

Secondly, don’t panic. Scientists at the University of Dundee in Scotland and elsewhere have discovered a single gene that, they say, is the key to blight resistance. “We are really excited by the discovery of RXLR. This has provided a signature to search for proteins that are delivered inside host cells, where they may be exposed to plant defence surveillance systems,” said Professor Paul Birch, the team leader. Clearly it won’t be long before the threat of late blight is a thing of the past.