10-27 IAN Psyllid 2

 Is it potato leaf roll virus  or not? A recent discovery  of diseased potatoes by Seed Potato Specialist Dr. Phillip Nolte and his colleagues at the University of Idaho’s Idaho Falls Research and Extension Center lead to question marks concerning what the disease was. It reads like a mystery novel.  “so we sent the software laboratory up in Washington state which is running research on a number of these diseases that can cause internal defects on potatoes. Got back a response from the scientists up there very quickly saying these are zebra chip. When I got back to this gentleman he said it was from a location in central Idaho. This is not one of those things where you want to make the wrong call. We took our time to verify that we could tie this to a field and that it was actually an Idaho source. Potatoes move all over the place and they did have a 1^st report that this disease was from southern Washington and Northern Oregon just a few weeks earlier. So our thought was what if somebody brought a few truckloads of potatoes over from Washington and they were running those through the wash plant and we got those and not something that actually occurred in Idaho. But in going back to the field that had been harvested, we were able to recover some tubers from the actual field that these were supposed to have come from, cut a few of them, saw some of the same symptoms, send them back and had it verified. Then we had a positive identification from an Idaho source.