News on Research from Germany

The World Potato Congress is very pleased to present its next webinar on Wednesday, March 31, 2021 with Albert Schirring, Strategy Lead Vegetables & Potato, Bayer AG.

Widespread fungal disease in plants can be controlled with a commercially available chemical that has been primarily used in medicine until now. This discovery was made by scientists from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the University of the State of Paraná in Brazil.

The German Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL) has approved the ethylene-based sprout suppressor Restrain as a safe crop protection product with immediate effect. The approval applies to the treatment of potatoes (for both domestic consumption and starch production), onions, garlic, shallots, propagating material, and tomatoes.

If there’s one thing potato plants don’t like, it’s heat. If the temperature is too high, potato plants form significantly lower numbers of tubers or sometimes none at all. Biochemists at FAU have now discovered the reason why.

In Pulsed Electric Field Treatment of potato, the treatment intensity needs to be monitored to optimize process performance and product yield. So how can that be done?

By analysing potato production data, information systems specialist Professor Wolfgang Maaß and his team want to help farmers and food companies identify potential benefits and optimize their processes.

As a result of the uncertainty regarding the reapproval of the active ingredient Diquat the potato industry made an effort to identify alternative solutions for haulm desiccation. Haulm killing with high-voltage electrical current showed the greatest chances of success.

If a surface has to be protected against corrosion, this usually takes place through coating it with paints or varnishes. Bio-based, environmentally-friendly solutions are hardly available. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute are developing a cost-effective coating based on renewable raw materials, potato starch in particular

Identification of the receptor for Cytolisin - the killer toxin of Phytophthora infestans - opens door to biological methods to protect potatoes and selective, biological herbicides as alternative for glyphosate

Colorado potato beetles are a dreaded pest of potatoes all over the world. Now, scientists from the Max Planck Institutes of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam-Golm and Chemical Ecology in Jena have shown that potato plants can be protected from herbivory using RNA interference (RNAi).

Insort GmbH is one of the winners of the International FoodTec Awards in the category GOLD. Insort received the award for its Sherlock Food Analyser (Sherlock Analyst).

“This is too good to be true” you might think when reading this article. Well….. it’s not!

An international team of scientists reveals that a unique strain of potato blight they call HERB-1 triggered the Irish potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century

BASF Plant Science will again conduct field trials this year with genetically optimized potatoes which are undergoing the EU approval process.

La empresa química alemana BASF ha anunciado este lunes que renuncia a desarrollar y comercializar en Europa organismos genéticamente modificados, entre ellos la polémica patata transgénica 'Amflora', debido al fuerte rechazo social en la mayoría de Es...

Volgens actuele schattingen zijn er dit jaar in Duitsland zo’n 11,9 miljoen ton aardappels gerooid van een totaal aardappelareaal van 259.400 hectare.

BASF Plant Science applied today for EU approval for Fortuna, a genetically optimized table potato.Fortuna has a wild potato’s natural protection to late blight, a disease causing severe problems in agriculture.

The skin is light brown, the meat luscious and yellow: from the outside alone, this new potato looks like any other. But on the inside, it is different. Its cells produce pure amylopectin, a starch used in the paper, textile and food industries. The ne...