It has been more than 150 years since the Irish potato famine, when the funguslike disease called blight annihilated the staple food for millions of people. But blight is still the most serious potato disease in Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world. Farmers spend billions of dollars annually on fungicides to keep blight at bay.
Now, genetic engineering may give potato crops built-in resistance to the pathogen. By placing a gene from a naturally blight-resistant wild potato into a farmed variety, researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of California, Davis have made plants that are invulnerable to a range of blight strains.