Walter Verweij
Post Doctoral Scientist
Contact details
Email: walter.verweij@sainsbury-laboratory.ac.uk
Research interests
Potato is an important crop in the worlds’ food production and despite the extensive use of agrochemicals, late blight, caused by the oomycete Phytophthora infestans, is responsible for substantial losses. In the past, late blight resistant genes (R genes) from Solanum demissum have been introgressed in cultivated potato but these were quickly overcome by new races of the pathogen.
One of the new races that start dominating the Phytophthora infestans populations in the United Kingdom is a very destructive isolate, called “superblight”, which is the main cause of potato crop losses nowadays. For this reason, we are specifically interested in R genes that give resistance to this isolate and we use a collection of wild potato from all over the world to search for resistance against it. Multiple Solanum accessions are screened in detached leaf assays and field trials. Once we have identified a resistant individual, we create a segregating population. Typically, R genes are cloned by map based cloning but we follow a new and quicker approach to identify R genes; we bulk genomic DNA from resistant and susceptible individuals and enrich the samples for R gene sequences. Subsequently, the enriched genomic DNA is sequenced on an Illumina GA2 instrument. In this way we establish an increased coverage on R genes and by deploying bioinformatic script, polymorphisms in R genes, between BR and BS reads, are identified.
Currently, we are following this approach to identify resistant genes in Solanum berthaultii, a wild type potato variety from Bolivia and our idea is, eventually, to simultaneously introduce several R genes in popular potato varieties in order to achieve durable resistance to late blight.
