Defeating Crop Blight-Hannah Moerk

Summary:

Researchers funded by the BBSRC Crop Science Initiative have made a discovery that could help build resistance to a late blight. A late blight is a devastating disease of potatoes and tomatoes costing the industry about 5-6 billion a year worldwide. Through their work on the interactions between potato plants, they have come up with a new approach to breeding resistance to late blight in potatoes. In the past they have tried to breed resistance to late blight by identifying plants that survive a period infection and could potentially help provide resistant varieties. However this approach is slow and takes time. With their discovery, they can use genetic analysis to identify plants for breeding that are inherently resistant to infection.

Opinion:

Potatoes and tomatoes are needed all over the world. The blight has became a serious problem, especially, as mentioned, in the UK. If going in genetically, identifying the breed, and discoverying how to inherent resistant helps farmers with the crops, then I think that more research should be done to advance forward. Meanwhile, this could be saving billions of dollars. Now the only question is how should this task be provided to farmers, and how much money is involved in the process?

http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2010/11/18/bioscience_researchers_defeating_potato_blight.html