IMPACT OF POTATO VIRUS Y ON LONG-TERM STORAGE OF POTATO. Principal Investigator(s)

In recent years, Potato Virus Y has reemerged as a serious disease problem in many potato production areas in the northern United States and eastern Canada. Three recently introduced cultivars, ‘Russet Norkotah’, ‘Shepody’, and ‘Silverton’ are widely grown and express mild or no symptoms when infected with PVY. The lack of symptoms often associated with these cultivars and novel, recombinant strains of this virus prevents accurate field identification and rouging of infected plants resulting in higher levels of virus inoculum and greater disease pressure. There is a lack of effective strategies to reduce the incidence of PVY infected plants and tubers, and there is a need to improve cost-effective methods of determining PVY levels in seed lots and further understanding the impact of current season virus infection on tuber storage and quality attributes. No information currently exists to document the impact of PVY infection on quality aspects tuber storage performance. Project History. This is a new project that has just been initiated in the 2007 growing season. Objectives outlined in this research are directly related to the recent and problematic reemergence of Potato Virus Y (PVY) in potato seed production in Wisconsin. Planned experiments will access the impact of PVY infection at different plant developmental stages along with different strains of the virus upon the long-term storability of select processing and fresh market cultivars. Further, the results obtained from field experiments will generate sufficient stocks of infected tubers to initiate and test the feasibility of greenhouse-based growout tests which may one day be used in lieu of the winter tests currently implemented.