Cause of great Irish potato blight identified

• Main Author: AccessScience Editors
• Format: Reference Entry
• Language: English
• DOI: 10.1036/1097-8542.BR0715131

One of history’s worst agricultural catastrophes was the great Irish potato famine of 1845–1849, which killed more than a million people in Ireland, forced the emigration of 1.5 million others, and fueled resentments between the Catholic and Protestant factions of the country for generations. The precise pathogen responsible for that catastrophic failure of the Irish potato crop was long a matter of speculation among agricultural researchers. In 2013, however, using DNA-based analytical techniques on samples of old potato leaves preserved in herbariums, an international team of scientists pinned the blight to a single strain of a common fungus. Beyond the value of this discovery in illuminating what triggered the potato famine, it marked the first time that researchers were able to study the genome of an extinct botanical pathogen from traces in old cuttings of its host plant. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) Disease ecology