17 April 2009

£3.5 million to battle potato blight

Researchers at the University of Dundee are to lead a £3.5million project investigating how microbes are able to cause the notorious crop disease 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.

Now researchers at the University of Dundee, the University of Warwick, and the Scottish Crop Research Institute are to examine how molecules called effectors from the potato pathogen Phytophthora infestans are able to cause late blight. They will also investigate how other effectors cause downy mildew, another significant problem in potato crops.

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 Scottish Crop Research Institute, based just outside 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.'

Professor Beynon, at Warwick, said the research was vital to unlock new strategies for plant disease prevention.

'Amazingly, of the hundreds of effectors in Phytophthora and Hyaloperonospora , it appears that none of them are the same," said Professor Beynon. "However, these effectors must suppress common host proteins in the plant immune system. Identifying these host proteins is vital for new strategies for plant disease prevention.'

The research could have implications not just for late blight and downy mildew but for many other plant diseases.

'We can imagine that many of the host plant proteins targeted by Phytophthora effectors will also represent key ‘pressure points’ that are manipulated by other pests and pathogens, so understanding late blight will hopefully have knock-on benefits for other plant diseases,' said Professor Birch.

'Plant disease is a considerable obstacle to global food production, so we hope this research will have wide implications for food security. When we understand the molecular interactions in the plant cell and how microbes cause disease, we can work out novel strategies to control or prevent crop losses and environmental damage'.

NOTES TO EDITORS

About BBSRC
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) is the UK funding agency for research in the life sciences. Sponsored by Government, BBSRC annually invests around £420 million in a wide range of research that makes a significant contribution to the quality of life for UK citizens and supports a number of important industrial stakeholders including the agriculture, food, chemical, healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors. BBSRC carries out its mission by funding internationally competitive research, providing training in the biosciences, fostering opportunities for knowledge transfer and innovation and promoting interaction with the public and other stakeholders on issues of scientific interest in universities, centres and institutes.

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