Funding sows hope that team can find cure for blight

Published on Friday 17 April 2009 22:07

ALMOST two centuries ago it was the plant pathogen which led to the deaths of more than a million men, women and children in the Irish potato famine.

The same disease that struck crops in the Highlands in the 1840s and 1850s, forcing almost two million crofting families to leave Scotland.

Even today, "late blight" is still wreaking havoc across the globe – accounting for more than 3 billion a year in crop failures and in the cost of fungicides.

But now a team of scientists, led by Scottish researchers, is offering fresh hope of finding a permanent cure to the devastating crop disease.

Researchers from Dundee and Warwick universities and the Scottish Crop Research Institute at Invergowrie, near Dundee, have been awarded a grant of 3.5 million from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council to examine how molecules called effectors from the potato pathogen Phytophthora infestans are able to cause late blight.

They hope that, by understanding the key processes involved, their research will pave the way for an eventual solution to the blight.