A gene in a wild potato plant boosts the plant's resistance to the destructive potato-blight fungus.

For ten years, Vivianne Vleeshouwers of Wageningen University in the Netherlands and her colleagues combed the Andes — the ancestral home of the potato — for genes involved in defence against the fungus Phytophthora infestans. This organism caused the 1840s Irish potato famine and is still a common pathogen.

They discovered that a wild potato, Solanum microdontum, contains a gene encoding a protein called ELR that recognizes elictin proteins, which are evolutionarily conserved in the fungus. ELR is an immune receptor that can trigger a defence response that kills infected leaf cells to slow the pathogen's spread.

The team transferred the gene to cultivated potato plants, where it conferred increased blight resistance. Using this gene could lead to more-durable blight resistance than other known resistance genes, the authors say.

Nature Plants http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2015.34 (2015)