Genetics from Russia have created a convenient, long-lived and cheap DNA test system that allows you to quickly find traces of the three dozen of the most harmful diseases of potato.
It has already been applied in the regions of Russia for large-scale verification of landings, the press service of the RSF reports.
“Thanks to the special technology of stabilization and immobilization of reagents, the shelf life of ready-made matrices at room temperature is 3–6 months, which is significantly higher than that of well-known world analogues,” says Natalia Statsyuk from the Research Institute of Phytopathology in Bolshiye Vyazemy.
In addition to the Colorado potato beetle, potatoes are also threatened by other, less noticeable and at the same time more dangerous pests and pathogens. Many of them begin to destroy potatoes almost immediately after planting, but they can often not be found before harvesting or mass death of plants.
A striking example of this is the famous late blight, the fungus Phytophthora infestans, which destroys potato tubers and almost does not manifest itself before the crop begins to mass rot even in the ground or a few weeks after harvest.
Bacterial and viral infections are even more dangerous - as a rule, it is impossible to fight them after plant infection, which is why their early diagnosis and elimination has long been a major problem for farmers.
Statsiuk and her colleagues solved this problem by creating a relatively convenient set of tests that will help potato growers protect their crops from the three dozen of the most dangerous and infectious pathogens, spending only two hours on it.
For its use, as scientists note, special laboratories and expensive reagents are not needed. It is enough to prepare samples of the analyzed potato and fill them into special wells filled with enzymes that recognize fragments of the phytophthora, bacteria and virus genomes and then scan them using a portable DNA analyzer.
“To carry out the analysis, you just need to isolate DNA from the samples, put it into the wells, install the matrix in a microchip amplifier and start the process. The analysis is automatic and takes about half an hour. Upon completion of the work, the system reports exactly which pathogens were detected, ”continues the geneticist.
As the press service of the Russian Science Foundation, these tests have already been tested in practice. Using similar sets of reagents, scientists conducted a large-scale check of the phytosanitary state of potato fields for the presence of 15 pathogens in a dozen regions of Russia.
These observations revealed several interesting features associated with the spread of these diseases throughout the country. For example, they turned out to be extremely heterogeneous - traces of microbes, fungi and viruses were found in only 8% of samples in the Moscow region, while more than half of the potatoes harvested in the Tver region were infected with at least one disease.
A similar scatter was present in how often different pathogens were found. As expected, most often potato was infected by late blight - its traces were found in 33% of samples and in all areas, while bacteria of the Dickeya dianthicola species and PMTV virus were found only in isolated parts of the country.
This system, according to its creators, can be used not only to protect the crop, but also to check the quality of imported vegetables. In addition, such tests will help farmers find the optimal potato variety that is resistant to the action of those pathogens that are present in their areas and areas.
Source: https://ria.ru