Latest Phytophthora infestans Stories

SAN DIEGO, Jan. 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Mighty 'Mato, the first line of grafted tomato plants available to home gardeners in North America, is introducing 21 new varieties of grafted tomatoes this year. This brings their total selection to 39 grafted tomato varieties for spring 2013, including many heirlooms, which are often more susceptible to soil, climate, and disease problems. By grafting favorite heirlooms to vigorous, disease-resistant rootstock, they produce larger, stronger,...

DAVIS, Calif., Jan. 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Marrone Bio Innovations today announced that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has approved a significant label expansion for Regalia(®), a biofungicide that boosts plants' natural defenses to fight fungal and bacterial diseases. The label expansion includes new soil applications, instructions for yield improvement in corn and soybeans, along with additional crops and target pathogens. "This label expansion is an important...

Scientists are reporting a key advance toward development of a way to combat the terrible plant diseases that caused the Irish potato famine and still inflict billions of dollars of damage to crops each year around the world. Their study appears in ACS' bi-weekly journal Organic Letters.Teck-Peng Loh and colleagues point out that the Phytophthora fungi cause extensive damage to food crops such as potatoes and soybeans as well as to ornamental plants like azaleas and rhododendrons. One species...

Researchers funded by the BBSRC Crop Science Initiative have made a discovery that could instigate a paradigm shift in breeding resistance to late blight - a devastating disease of potatoes and tomatoes costing the industry £5-6Bn a year worldwide. They will share this research with industry at an event in London later today (18 November).Professor Paul Birch of the University of Dundee and his team at the Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI), the University of Dundee, and the...

Scientists are reporting a key advance toward development of a way to combat the terrible plant diseases that caused the Irish potato famine and still inflict billions of dollars of damage to crops each year around the world. Their study appears in ACS' bi-weekly journal Organic Letters.Teck-Peng Loh and colleagues point out that the Phytophthora fungi cause extensive damage to food crops such as potatoes and soybeans as well as to ornamental plants like azaleas and rhododendrons. One species...

Wild potato germplasm that offers resistance to some major potato diseases has been identified by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists.Geneticists Dennis Halterman and Shelley Jansky pinpointed the resistant wild potato species in studies at the ARS Vegetable Crops Research Unit in Madison, Wis.Halterman has identified a wild potato species called Solanum verrucosum that contains a gene with resistance to late blight, considered the most destructive disease of potato. The wild...

Potatoes offering elevated levels of phytonutrients thought to promote health could add a new dimension to the consumer diet. But the journey from farm to fork can be a perilous one fraught with sundry microorganisms ready to attack the spuds, either while they're still in the ground or during storage.In Aberdeen, Idaho, Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists Rich Novy and Jonathan Whitworth are taking on the late-blight fungus, Phytophthora infestans, best known for its role in the...

DAVIS, Calif., Jan. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Marrone Bio Innovations (MBI) announces that the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) has approved the use of Regalia® in the state of California. Regalia contains a unique active ingredient from the extract of giant knotweed that provides superior control of both fungal and bacterial diseases in many key California crops. It is already being successfully integrated into disease control programs in other regions of the US and abroad,...

Research into the potato tuber at the Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development and at the NEIKER-Tecnalia Technology Centre has, in recent years, focused on the development of new varieties of potato adapted to Spanish agro-climatic conditions. The Basque technology center has updated the traditional system for improving strains of the tuber by involving novel techniques that enable obtaining new varieties that are the most resistant, productive and apt for both fresh...

A team of scientists has unraveled the entire genome of the pathogen that resulted in the Irish potato famine in the 1840s.Scientists said the new genome map would help researchers in their fight against the same pathogen, which appears to be on the rise once again, as it still amounts for about $7 billion dollars in agricultural losses each year.Writing in the journal Nature, the study was led by the Broad Institute of Harvard University and MIT, which worked alongside scientists from dozens...