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Potato famines hit Ireland in the 1840s and then again in the 1870s, and scientists have now found that both were causes by the appearance of the same microorganism, Phytophthora infestans.
Scientists at Rothamsted extracted DNA from potato samples dating back as far as the 1840s, that had been dried, ground and stored in glass bottles by Victorian scientists, and analysed it for the presence of the blight pathogen."We wanted to see if it was the same strain and it was," he said."It had survived between the 1840s and the 1870s between seasons on these potato tubers."
Rothamsted scientists study 170-year-old potatoesUnfortunately, the article does not hypothesize how the blight survived all those years, except what is above (that it survived on the tubers).
