Dundee, Scotland
May 1, 2009
Researchers from
Scottish Crop Research Institute
(SCRI) will join forces with colleagues at the universities of
Dundee and
Warwick in a multi-million
pound project to investigate late blight – responsible for the
Irish potato famine and still wreaking havoc around the world.
Late blight is still the most destructive potato disease in the
world and accounts for more than £3billion a year in crop
failure and the cost of fungicides.
Researchers at the University of Dundee, the University of
Warwick, and SCRI, will examine how molecules called effectors
from the potato pathogen Phytophthora infestans are able to
cause late blight and Hyaloperonospora arabidopsidis effectors
cause downy mildew in the model plant Arabidopsis.
The £3.5million grant from the Biotechnology and Biological
Sciences Research Council comes under the Longer and Larger
(LoLa) programme to fund collaborative research. The research
project will be led by Professor Paul Birch, in the Division of
Plant Sciences at the University of Dundee, in collaboration
with Professor Jim Beynon at the University of Warwick, and
involves researchers at the SCRI, Scotland’s leading crop
research institute, near Dundee.
Professor Birch said: “Late blight, in the mid-19th century, was
responsible for the Irish potato famine when a million people
died of starvation and more than 1.5 million emigrated from
Ireland. Today, it is still the worst potato disease and results
in huge losses. Recently, two related species, Phytophthora
ramorum and Phytophthora kernoviae have been introduced into the
UK, where they are infecting native trees and shrubs, posing a
considerable threat to gardens and the natural environment.
“As in animals, plants have evolved a complex immune system to
prevent attack from micro-organisms but microbes continue to
evolve ways to get round the defences and establish disease.
They achieve this by secreting proteins called effectors into
cells of the plant which block the plant’s immune responses.
“The discovery that the pathogens Phytophthora and
Hyaloperonospora have hundreds of genes encoding these
effectors, along with recent advances in technology to study
protein-protein interactions, provides an unparalleled
opportunity to investigate how plant defences are targeted and
suppressed by invading microbes.”
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