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The potato is a starchy tuber of the plant Solanum tuberosum and is a root vegetable native to the Americas, with the plant itself being a perennial in the nightshade family Solanaceae.
Agricultural biotechnology, also known as agritech, is an area of agricultural science involving the use of scientific tools and techniques, including genetic engineering, molecular markers, molecular diagnostics, vaccines, and tissue culture, to modify living organisms: plants, animals, and microorganisms. Crop biotechnology is one aspect of agricultural biotechnology which has been greatly developed upon in recent times. Desired trait are exported from a particular species of Crop to an entirely different species. These transgene crops possess desirable characteristics in terms of flavor, color of flowers, growth rate, size of harvested products and resistance to diseases and pests.
Plant pathology is the scientific study of diseases in plants caused by pathogens and environmental conditions. Organisms that cause infectious disease include fungi, oomycetes, bacteria, viruses, viroids, virus-like organisms, phytoplasmas, protozoa, nematodes and parasitic plants. Not included are ectoparasites like insects, mites, vertebrate, or other pests that affect plant health by eating plant tissues. Plant pathology also involves the study of pathogen identification, disease etiology, disease cycles, economic impact, plant disease epidemiology, plant disease resistance, how plant diseases affect humans and animals, pathosystem genetics, and management of plant diseases.
A pathosystem is a subsystem of an ecosystem and is defined by the phenomenon of parasitism. A plant pathosystem is one in which the host species is a plant. The parasite is any species in which the individual spends a significant part of its lifespan inhabiting one host individual and obtaining nutrients from it. The parasite may thus be an insect, mite, nematode, parasitic Angiosperm, fungus, bacterium, mycoplasma, virus or viroid. Other consumers, however, such as mammalian and avian herbivores, which graze populations of plants, are normally considered to be outside the conceptual boundaries of the plant pathosystem.
Rebecca J. Nelson, is an American biologist and a professor at Cornell University and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
Sugarcane smut is a fungal disease of sugarcane caused by the fungus Sporisorium scitamineum. The disease is known as culmicolous, which describes the outgrowth of fungus of the stalk on the cane. It attacks several sugarcane species and has been reported to occur on a few other grass species as well, but not to a critical amount. The most recognizable characteristic of this disease is a black or gray growth that is referred to as a "smut whip". Resistance to sugarcane smut is the best course of action for management, but also the use of disease free seed is important. On smaller scale operations treatments using hot water and removing infected plants can be effective. The main mode of spore dispersal is the wind but the disease also spreads through the use of infected cuttings. Sugarcane smut is a devastating disease in sugarcane growing areas globally.
The gene-for-gene relationship was discovered by Harold Henry Flor who was working with rust of flax. Flor showed that the inheritance of both resistance in the host and parasite ability to cause disease is controlled by pairs of matching genes. One is a plant gene called the resistance (R) gene. The other is a parasite gene called the avirulence (Avr) gene. Plants producing a specific R gene product are resistant towards a pathogen that produces the corresponding Avr gene product. Gene-for-gene relationships are a widespread and very important aspect of plant disease resistance. Another example can be seen with Lactuca serriola versus Bremia lactucae.
The term vertical resistance, used commonly in context of plant selection, was first used by J.E. Vanderplank to describe single-gene resistance. This contrasted the term horizontal resistance which was used to describe many-gene resistance. Raoul A. Robinson further refined the definition of vertical resistance, emphasizing that in vertical resistance there are single genes for resistance in the host plant, and there are also single genes for parasitic ability in the parasite. This phenomenon is known as the gene-for-gene relationship, and it is the defining character of vertical resistance.
In genetics, the term horizontal resistance was first used by J.E. Vanderplank to describe many-gene resistance, which is sometimes also called generalized resistance. This contrasts with the term vertical resistance which was used to describe single-gene resistance. Raoul A. Robinson further refined the definition of horizontal resistance. Unlike vertical resistance and parasitic ability, horizontal resistance and horizontal parasitic ability are entirely independent of each other in genetic terms.
Rotylenchulus reniformis, the reniform nematode, is a species of parasitic nematode of plants with a worldwide distribution in the tropical and subtropical regions.
King Edward is a potato cultivar grown in the UK since 1902, making it one of the oldest cultivars still grown commercially.
Crop diversity is the variance in genetic and phenotypic characteristics of plants used in agriculture. Over the past 50 years, there has been a major decline in two components of crop diversity; genetic diversity within each crop and the number of species commonly grown.
Plant disease resistance protects plants from pathogens in two ways: by pre-formed structures and chemicals, and by infection-induced responses of the immune system. Relative to a susceptible plant, disease resistance is the reduction of pathogen growth on or in the plant, while the term disease tolerance describes plants that exhibit little disease damage despite substantial pathogen levels. Disease outcome is determined by the three-way interaction of the pathogen, the plant and the environmental conditions.
Plant breeding is the science of changing the traits of plants in order to produce desired characteristics. It has been used to improve the quality of nutrition in products for humans and animals. The goals of plant breeding are to produce crop varieties that boast unique and superior traits for a variety of agricultural applications. The most frequently addressed traits are those related to biotic and abiotic stress tolerance, grain or biomass yield, end-use quality characteristics such as taste or the concentrations of specific biological molecules and ease of processing.
Macrosiphum euphorbiae, the potato aphid, is a sap-sucking pest insect in the family Aphididae. It infests potatoes and a number of other commercially important crops.
Lenape (B5141-6) is a potato cultivar first released in 1967 and named after the Lenape Native American tribe, but it had to be pulled from the market in 1970 after findings of its high glycoalkaloid content. It was bred by Wilford Mills of Pennsylvania State University in collaboration with the Wise Potato Chip Company. The Lenape potato was produced by crossing Delta Gold with a wild Peruvian potato known for its resistance to insects. It was selected for its high specific gravity and low sugar content which made it ideal for producing potato chips but it was also immune to potato virus A and resistant to common strains of late blight. It is of medium-late maturity and produces round, white tubers with shallow eyes.
Maris Piper is the most widely grown potato variety in the United Kingdom accounting for 16% of the planted area in 2014. Introduced in 1966 it was one of the first potato varieties bred to be resistant to a form of potato cyst nematode, a major pest of potato production in the UK. It has been the most widely grown variety in the UK since 1980 and is suitable for a range of uses including chips, roast potatoes and mashed potatoes.
Scutellonema bradys, also known as yam nematode, is a migratory endoparasitic nematode causing major damage to yam crop in many African tropical regions, as well in parts of South and Central America and Asia. They can cause reduction of 20-30% in tuber weight at harvest.
The Vertifolia effect is a well documented phenomenon in the fields of plant breeding and plant pathology. It is characterized by the erosion of a crop’s horizontal resistance to disease during a breeding cycle due to the presence of strong vertical resistance, characterized by the presence of R genes. This effect was observed in late blight of potato. This phenomenon was first described by J.E. Van der Plank in his 1963 book Plant Disease: Epidemics and Control. Van der Plank observed that under artificial selection the potato variety Vertifolia had stronger vertical resistance to the potato late blight pathogen, Phytophthora infestans, as measured by the presence of specific R genes. However, when the pathogen overcame these R genes Vertifolia exhibited a greater loss of horizontal resistance than varieties with fewer R genes and lower vertical resistance. This effect suggests that when a pathogen evolves an avirulence gene to counteract a variety’s R gene, that variety will be more susceptible to the pathogen than other varieties.
Norman Willison Simmonds FRSE FIB FLS was a 20th-century British botanist. He was a world authority on the cultivation of bananas. He was the first non-American to be awarded the Bronx-based Society for Economic Botany's Distinguished Economic Botanist Award.
References
- ↑ "Raoul Arthur Robinson Plant Pathologist and Horizontal Resistance Breeder 1928-2014". The American Phytopathological Society. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
- ↑ Victoria College Register 1929-56
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