Madison, Wisconsin
November 9, 2007
Zahi K. Atallah has seen it happen
so many times before. "Year in and year out, we look at the
fields and they look beautiful. We harvest the spuds, and they
look outstanding," says Atallah, a
University of Wisconsin-Madison postdoctoral researcher in
the plant pathology department. "Then we store them, and they
turn into mush."
For potato growers, a good harvest doesn't automatically mean a
good year. Every year, about 8 to 9 percent of the nation's
potato crop goes bad sitting in storage lockers while waiting to
go to a chip or fry factory. That's a loss of about $16 million
worth of potatoes in Wisconsin alone.
In an effort to curb this type of loss, Atallah developed a test
that will enable farmers to better separate potatoes fit for
long-term storage from those that are not. The test, which will
be offered through a Wisconsin company specializing in plant
disease diagnostics, involves collecting healthy-looking tubers
from the field before harvest, cleaning and juicing them, and
then extracting their genetic material.
Using a technique known as polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, a
technician can look at the DNA contained in each sample and
detect foreign microbial agents that cause storage losses,
including late blight, pink rot and fusarium. The results will
tell farmers, on a field-by-field basis, which potatoes have
high levels of these microbes.
"So, instead of storing the good with the bad, now growers can
do triage," says Atallah. The potatoes that have a high risk of
spoiling in storage can be sent for processing immediately or
stored for a short amount of time. The ones that look good, on
the other hand, can be put into long-term storage, he explains.
Early on, Atallah's project - which was funded by the Wisconsin
Potato and Vegetable Growers Association and the U.S. Department
of Agriculture - attracted the interest of Randy Van Haren,
co-founder of Pest Pros, Inc., a crop consulting firm and plant
disease diagnostic laboratory located in Plainfield, Wis. "I've
always been interested in the power of PCR technology, and have
kept my eye on it. After hearing [about Atallah's project], I
thought to myself, 'It's time to start investing in this
technology,'" says Van Haren.
The company worked with Atallah and Walter Stevenson, a
UW-Madison plant pathologist who specializes in potatoes, to
help speed commercialization of the test. Now with the capacity
to run the test in-house, Pest Pros will begin promoting the
potato pathogen assay next year.
This assay is the first of many PCR-based diagnostic tests that
Van Haren plans to offer. "PCR is very fast and very sensitive,"
he says. "The future of growth in our business is going to be in
PCR technology." |
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