New Breeding Strategies for Verticillium Wilt Resistance (North Dakota)
Verticillium wilt (VW) of potato is a widespread and persistent problem in virtually all significant production areas in the United States. The only successful control strategy currently available to growers is soil fumigation, which is expensive and environmentally harmful. Host plant resistance offers the most cost-effective long-term control strategy for VW. One likely candidate for a potato VW resistance (R) gene is an ortholog of the tomato Ve gene, which has been cloned and found to confer immunity to VW. We have recently developed a molecular marker within a Ve-like gene from resistant potato and found that this marker co-segregates with the VW resistance phenotype in a segregating population.
Our specific objectives are to:
1. Identify germplasm that has been previously documented to be either resistant or susceptible to VW and verify the resistance phenotype using quantitative PCR.
2. Amplify and sequence Ve orthologs from the resistant and susceptible individuals for use in identifying single nucleotide polymorphisms that differentiate resistant from susceptible Ve alleles.
Inoculations of seedlings from crosses between cultivated breeding parents, phenotypic characterization of the inoculated seedlings, stem DNA extraction and quantitative PCR.