Transgenic technology is an excellent alternative for improvement of crop production and disease free crops such as potato, which is one of the most important crops worldwide. One of the first steps to apply the transgenic technique is the establishment of an efficient plant regeneration protocol. This is a limiting step in this kind of study, since most protocols are species-specific and some ...

The continuous increase in energy demand, the high cost of imported oil, and the growing concerns about climate change have sparked a number of initiatives from governments around the world to increase production of energy from renewable sources. Along these lines, the Chilean government is analyzing the introduction of a law to set a reference value of 5% of biofuel production to be placed on ...

In the North China Plain, groundwater tables have been dropping at unsustainable rates of 1 m per year due to irrigation of a double cropping system of winter wheat and summer maize. To reverse the trend, we examined whether alternative crop rotations could save water. Moisture contents were measured weekly at 20 cm intervals in the top 180 cm of soil as part of a 12-year field experiment with ...

Potato virus Y (PVY) is a major pathogen of potatoes and other solanaceous crops worldwide. It is most closely related to potyviruses first or only found in the Americas, and it almost certainly originated in the Andes, where its hosts were domesticated. We have inferred the phylogeny of the published genomic sequences of 240 PVY isolates collected since 1938 worldwide, but not the Andes. All f...

Reflectance anisotropy is a signal that contains information on the optical and structural properties of a surface and can be studied by performing multi-angular reflectance measurements that are often done using cumbersome goniometric measurements. In this paper we describe an innovative and fast method where we use a hyperspectral pushbroom spectrometer mounted on a multirotor unmanned aerial...

The potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) ranks third in worldwide consumption among food crops. Whereas disposal of potato peels poses significant challenges for the food industry, secondary metabolites in these tissues are also bioactive and essential to crop development. The diverse primary and secondary metabolites reported in whole tubers and wound-healing tissues prompted a comprehensive profilin...

With rising environmental concerns for current practices of fertilizer N management in the humid and cool areas, we simulated soil N dynamics and plant N use in the potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) cropping system using the software Stella. The objectives were to predict inseason N requirements by the potato crop, tuber yield, N uptake, N partitioning within root, leaf, stem and tuber, and N loss ...

Worldwide, Dickeya (formerly Erwinia chrysanthemi) is causing soft rot diseases on a large diversity of crops and ornamental plants. Strains affecting potato are mainly found in D. dadantii, D. dianthicola and D. zeae, which appear to have a marked geographical distribution. Furthermore, a few Dickeya isolates from potato are attributed to D. chrysanthemi and D. dieffenbachiae. In Europe, isola...

Recent increases in nitrate concentrations in the Suwannee River and associated springs in northern Florida have raised concerns over the contributions of non-point sources. The Middle Suwannee River Basin (MSRB) is of special concern because of prevalent karst topography, unconfined aquifers and sandy soils which increase vulnerability of the ground water contamination from agricultural operat...

Growing resistant cultivars is the best method of protecting the crops against Potato virus Y (PVY). There are a few sources of PVY resistance/tolerance in tobacco acquired through mass selection, X-ray induced mutagenesis and introgressions from wild Nicotiana species. Here, we compare major sources of PVY resistance/tolerance in inoculation tests using ten PVY isolates collected in Central Eu...