February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Andrew Bushe
DUBLIN — In a major scientific breakthrough, the remains of blight-withered potato plants grown in Ireland during the Great Famine are helping to solve the mystery of the devastating disease.
For the first time, a scientist has managed to extract DNA from dried Irish potato leaves that had been stored for 150 years.
The research, which has similarities to the plot of the dinosaur movie "Jurassic Park," will unlock some of the mysteries of fungus, which has reemerged with a vengeance around the world in recent years.
Professor Jean Beagle Ristaino, a plant pathologist at North Carolina State University, outlined her research at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.
After the blight fungus, phytophthora infestans, began to lay waste the Irish potato crop in 1845, specimens of infected plants were brought to London, where experts at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew tried to find a way to fight it.
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But it was to be 25 years before the Bordeaux mixture fungicide was developed — too late to stop the ravages of the great hungers of 1845-50.
The result was more than a million dying of starvation and millions more forced to emigrate.
The shriveled Irish potato plants, which were collected between 1845 and 1847, remained stored in Kew’s dried plant collection with seven million other specimens.
Now, using these unique "time capsules," as Ristaino has called them, she has extracted and amplified strands of DNA.
Using recent advances in molecular biology, the university team plans to track the migration of the fungus around the world and detect its presence more rapidly and accurately in potatoes before they are stored or planted.
"This research opens a window to epidemics of the past," Ristaino said. "There are so many unsolved mysteries that this DNA should finally help us answer.
"Where did the blight pathogen originate? How did it spread around the world? How has it evolved over the past 150 years?
"Ultimately, if we can learn how the late blight pathogen has evolved, we can develop new control measures that could help eradicate future outbreaks."