Just like vitamins provide people with a natural immune system boost, researchers are testing whether they could benefit potatoes grown in the Hermiston, Ore., region the same way.
For the past year, specialists at the Hermiston Agricultural Research and Extension Center have been researching whether vitamin B1, also known as thiamine, can help potato plants fight off the two largest threats to the crop: potato virus Y (PVY) and zebra chip.
Specialists are now starting to get the results of the trial.
Postdoctoral student Amber Vinchesi, plant biologist Aymeric Goyer and entomologist Silvia Rondon spent all last summer researching vitamin B1 and how it has positively affected crops’ ability to fight off disease. Goyer said cucumber, grape, tobacco and rice crops have successfully fought off diseases that threaten them after they were treated with thiamine, but potato plants have not been tested until now.
Goyer said the diseases, especially PVY, are the most detrimental to the potato plant. Their hope is, he said, by treating potato plants with thiamine, the vitamin will boost their immune systems and better equip them to fight off the diseases.
“PVY is the No. 1 disease in potatoes,” he said. “It has been here for many years now, and there are new PVY strains that are appearing. It looks like it is going to be here for a while.”
Vinchesi said the main issue with both PVY and zebra chip is they decrease yield and tuber quality of the potatoes, making them unmarketable. “It puts lines in the potato chip,” Goyer said. “You can actually see some stripes if the disease is there.”
Last summer, he, Vinchesi and Rondon started a trial to test the effects of the vitamin on potatoes.
Goyer said they set up the trial in two stages, which tested each disease separately. He said to test the effectiveness of thiamine on zebra chip, they sprayed the vitamin on a selection of plants and then released infected potato psyllids, a type of pest which can carry the bacteria for the disease, into cages containing potato plants. He said they then evaluated the effects of the disease on the tubers.
Goyer said they didn’t notice any difference at first, but they are now using molecular tools to monitor the disease’s progression in the plants at different stages.
“We want to look at whether the thiamine treatment delayed the spread of the disease,” he said. “We harvest leaf samples during the growing season.”
Goyer said they harvested the crop at increments, ranging from a week to eight weeks, to look at various time points to see if they could detect the disease at different stages.
For the PVY trial, Goyer said, instead of trying to infect the plant with an insect, such as aphids, they chose to do it mechanically. He said they inoculated the plants mechanically by wounding a leaf of the plant and rubbing them with ground leaves of tobacco plants that tested positive for the disease.
Goyer said, unfortunately, the researchers haven’t gone through all of their samples from that portion of the trial yet, but they are hopeful in their results. He said initial examination shows no real differences in potato yield, but results are preliminary at this point.
“It is still in the early stages, but we are hopeful because it worked on many plants with many different diseases,” he said. “It would be very unlikely if it didn’t work on potatoes with the two diseases we are trying to test.”
Goyer said even though they haven’t unearthed any positive results from the trial, the group will continue the tests into the next growing season. During the next trial, they are going do a few things differently. For one, he said the researchers are going to apply the vitamin to the plants multiple times throughout the growing season.
Goyer said they will also continue to process the samples from this last year’s trials to see if thiamine had any effect on particular stages of the plant as it grew. Goyer and Vinchesi said if the vitamin does help potato plants fight off disease, it would not necessarily replace any current pest control methods, but would act as a catalyst in the plant’s efforts to control disease.
“From our results this past year, we are hopeful that thiamine has a positive effect on the plant at higher doses,” Vinchesi said. “Thiamine would be a great addition or alternative treatment for potato growers in the Columbia Basin.”
Goyer said the thiamine treatment could potentially reduce the use of certain pesticides and could even act as an agent for organic growers.
“It may be a very good tool for the organic growers of the region because, again, it is not a pesticide,” he said. “It is a vitamin.”
Source: Hermiston (Ore.) Herald