The tomato industry is focused on tomatoes that ship well, look great and are resistant to late blight (outbreaks of fungus spores that plague tomato crops).
Severe fire blight outbreaks can result in the destruction of whole orchards.
Production fields with potato late blight outbreaks were reported by the extension services of private companies (Cebeco Agrochemie, Agrifirm, CropSolutions, Agrarische Unie, Profyto, Nestlé, Syngenta, Bayer, HLB, DLV, Dacom, and Agrovision) and potato growers.
With our much richer dataset, we could demonstrate that the late blight outbreaks during the 19th century were a pandemic caused by a single P. infestans lineage, but that this lineage was not the direct ancestor of the one that had come to dominate the global P. infestans population during much of the 20th century.
Professor Fry, who is genetically tracking the blight, said the outbreak spread in part from the hundreds of thousands of tomato plants bought by home gardeners at Wal-Mart, Lowe's, Home Depot and Kmart stores starting in April.
My friend Helen, who has an allotment in Worcestershire, says that when they had an outbreak of blight, they weren't allowed to burn the affected plant material because of council planning regulations.
Last month potato growers were blamed for worsening an outbreak of potato blight by failing to dispose of infected potatoes.
Although there are no official estimates yet on crop loss, a severe outbreak of late blight fungus in tomatoes, first noted in June, is sweeping through farms and gardens in the Northeast.
The devastating outbreak of late blight of potato (Phytophthora infestans) that began in Europe in 1845 and brought about the Irish famine caused starvation, death, and mass migration of the Irish population.
DNA from herbarium specimens has also been useful in phylogeographic studies (Lister et al., 2010), for example, by providing direct evidence of the origin of the European potato in relation to outbreaks of potato blight disease (Ames and Spooner, 2008).
Severe and sporadic outbreaks of turcicum leaf blight have now reappeared in East Africa [ 23- 25].
