Science geek out!

Late blight of potato, in which leaves turn black and tubers turn to mush

So I met the girl I'll be working with at the USDA yesterday to hear about the project she has in mind for me and holy toledo I am to be inventing potatoes! I am to be on the cutting edge of plant molecular biology! I am to work on actual things that (assuming I am successful) would actually be useful in the actual world!

Firstly, genetic modification has a bad rap. I know. People are not crazy about human-invented (xenogenic) genes escaping into nature and doing we don't know what yet, and people are not excited about human-gods sticking firefly genes (transgenic) in tobacco plants. Or adding resistance to antibiotics into anything if it means antibiotics are less likely to be effective when we really need them.

We are relatively ok with the sort of interspecies hybridization that brought us pluots or mutation breeding whereby we nuke seeds and see what happens. And crazy stuff can happen with mutation natural or otherwise. The less fun part of natural breeding is the kind of monominded selection for specific phenotypic traits that brings us firm but tasteless tomatoes. Or in more serious cases amps up allergens and other natural toxins.

But! We can do all the good stuff without the bad stuff!

It just so happens that a wild variety of potato is particularly resistant to Phytophthera infestans, the fungus-like beast that took down Ireland when it caused the potato famine, and we can borrow its gene for other sexually compatible potatoes. We can double check to make sure the bacterial plasmid's antibiotic resistance gene didn't make it into the plant DNA, and although the plasmid DNA of the bacterial vector generally used for this sort of thing has border sequences telling the plant where to snip built in, we can swap those for plant versions so that what's left in your potato is 100% natural potato DNA, something that could have been created by nature itself given enough time.

The lab I'll be working in has already done a sort of proof of concept with one breed of potato, and five years on, they're still good at fighting late blight (caused by P. infestans) , which means they don't seem to be exerting the sort of selective pressure that breeds super-strains of pathogens. (Typically this will occur in two or three years). And yours truly shall be trying doing my darndest to duplicate this success in more commercially appealing varieties of potato. If it works, it will be huge. HUGE.

Hello, grad school!