Syngenta has announced it will donate the genetic information on Phytophthora infestans - or potato late blight - to an international scientific gene database. The disease is considered one of the most devastating plant diseases in global agriculture.
Syngenta donated the sequence on nearly 18,000 individual genes expressed at key stages in the life cycle of the disease to GenBank. The company worked five years within the Syngenta Phytophthora Consortium, an international panel of academic institutions, to analyze these genes and develop a partial genomic sequence.
Late blight was the cause of the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1850) and continues to cost billions of dollars of potato and tomato crop losses annually. The Phytophthora infestans family also includes the pathogen causing the emergent Sudden Oak Death disease recently recognized in California.
Later this year Syngenta also plans to make available genomic data for three other plant pathogens, the fungi: Botrytis cinerea, Fusarium graminearum and fusarium verticilliodes.
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