The Project

Phytophthora infestans, an important plant pathogen and causative agent of Potato blight, belongs to the phylum Oomycetes. Initially, Oomycetes had been classified as lower fungi, but recent molecular analysis of the nuclear srRNA gene as well as ultrastructural data clearly show that they group together with the stramenopile lineage (golden and brown algae, diatoms, etc.). The Scottish Crop Research Institute has been identifying genes expressed at different times during infection. Subtracted material from different time points during plant infection hybridised to a BAC library of P. infestans (27,000 clones representing 10-fold genome coverage, average insert 100 kb), to isolate pathogen sequences. The BACs have been fingerprinted and contiged in each case. The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Pathogen Genomics group has sequenced 2 BACs to completion and annotated.

This work was funded by the SCRI through a collaboration with Dr. Paul Birch.

Accessing the P. infestans Sequence data

Sequence data can be downloaded from the FTP site.

This work is now published.

Searching the P. infestans genomic sequence online

You can also search against P. infestans genomic sequence using our online BLAST server.