As the home of beloved snack companies like Martin’s Potato Chips, Utz and Snyder’s of Hanover, Pennsylvania values its potatoes.
As the home of beloved snack companies like Martin’s Potato Chips, Utz and Snyder’s of Hanover, Pennsylvania values its potatoes. Tasty tubers across the state may face the threat of newly identified pathogen strains, though, according to Penn State researchers who made the finding and aim to develop management strategies.
They published their work in the journal Systematic and Applied Microbiology.
The researchers collected potato stems or tubers that exhibited symptoms of black leg or soft rot — including wilting, stunting, black lesions and rotting tubers, among others — from 26 potato fields in Pennsylvania. These diseases, which can lead to crop loss, are caused caused predominantly by bacteria in the Pectobacterium species and more recently the Dickeya species.
The team isolated, cultured and identified 456 samples of bacteria infecting the potatoes, including six species of Pectobacterium and one strain of Dickeya that previously had not been reported in Pennsylvania. One species of Pectobacterium previously had not been reported in the U.S.
Read more at Penn State
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