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The Cause Of The Irish Potato Famine

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In this 21st century we are heavily consumed by technology and food. We constantly see advertisements of eating healthy and what these nutrients that these food provide for our benefits. Eating fresh organic food nowadays is a crucial part of our daily living. From sowing to harvesting and selling the produce a lot goes on backstage that not many people are aware about. Rice, potatoes, milk and eggs are some of the staple foods that most people use. When a staple food is destroyed is can effect many people economically and by health. An invasive pathogen that was originated in Central Mexico that was very detrimental for potatoes was Phytophythora infestans. The disease is also known as potato late blight. Phytophythora infestans are …show more content…

They then gradually spread and form ring of necrotizing tissue (Sedlakova et al 2011). At first the plant will look healthy before the lesions are visible on the outside. This is also a challenge for the farmers because they will not know if their produce is unhealthy until it is visible. By the time they can cut of the plant the disease would have spread to the neighboring plants as well. P. infestans are produced through sexual and asexual mating. The two mating types are known as A1 and A2 ( Nowicki et al 2012). When mycelia of both types interact they produce oospores sexually. Mycelia is the branched filament of fungi (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2017). Oospores are spores that have a thick coating that allows them to survive harsh environmental conditions for a long period (Nowicki et al 2012). When both these types mate they produce a worse isolate compared to only if A1 mating occurs. The production of these more harmful isolates was detected by researchers in United States which has made controlling this pathogen more difficult (Fall et al 2015). Sporangia of P. infectans also produce zoospores through asexual mating. Sexual and asexual mating is influenced by the environment. Asexual is mating is encouraged when the weather is a warmer and oospores are produced in cooler weather hence for the thick coating of oospores. Some biosecurities that are implemented in controlling the pathogens are by spraying fungicides, removing any infected potatoes from the

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