I have said it before, I have been growing potatoes in one of the wettest
areas of Ireland for 18 years without any chemicals and no blight damage by
using a few simple organic techniques :
-using a mixture of home grown seed potatoes and a mixture of potatoes grown
from real seed.
-immunizing soil against blight by using enough home made compost and never
taking potentially diseased botanical material away.
It is that simple and all the rest is unnecessary tripe. Gmo potatoes may
kill more rats but that might be a dubious benefit.
john in West Cork
Solanum bulbocastanum, was stably resistant to blight but could not be
sexually crossed with potatoes. A process called somatic hybridization
was used to create sexual hybrids. Somatic hybridization includes
fusing cells from cell cultures of Solanum bulbocastanum and potato,
fused cells contain nuclei of both potato and Solanum bulbocastanum.
When the fused cells undergo mitosis the chromosomes of the two species
are mixed and a single hybrid nucleus is formed in the cell. The cells
can be cultured on solid media to form solid callous (tumor) which when
treated with plant growth hormones produces plantlets that produce
flowering plants . The somatic hybrids have irregular meiosis and
irregular chromosome pairing but relatively stable blight resistant
lines can be obtained (5,6,7) Along with the 11 potato blight
resistance genes that produce broad spectrum resistance are very
effective against blight, these .include the gene RB (8) along with the
genes Rpi-blb1 (9) and Rpi-blb 2 (10) which are active in both potato
and tomato. The somatic hybrids are useful in identifying resistance
genes and transmitted into potato breeding lines by crossing.
Nevertheless, genetic modification of potato breeding lines is
presently preferred because resistance can be introduced into
commercial lines with greater speed.
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