News Release Distributed 08/27/15

BATON ROUGE, La. – The LSU AgCenter’s sweet potato Foundation Seed Program is now part of the National Clean Plant Network, a group that strives to keep specialty crops free of diseases.

Sweet potatoes are a new addition to the network, which provides land-grant universities funding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop and evaluate virus testing procedures and make high-quality planting stocks available to the industry.

The AgCenter received $96,000 that will go toward new greenhouse lights to speed up production of sweet potato foundation seed and studies of new testing methods, said AgCenter plant pathologist Chris Clark.

Seed produced at the AgCenter Sweet Potato Research Station, which are tested to assure they are not infected with known viruses, are grown around the country. However, planting material is sometimes delayed reaching growers. Currently, no standard virus testing procedures exist for universities that want to conduct trials or produce seed of a variety developed at another institution.

“When we release a new variety, we send virus-tested tissue cultures to other universities,” Clark said. “Because they don’t know what kind of testing we do, they test it all over again.”

A more harmonized system would allow other members of the network to “be confident in what we’re sending each other,” which means quicker, more effective testing, he said.

Healthy planting stocks are critical because they prevent yield-reducing viruses from infecting growers’ fields.

In addition to sweet potatoes, groups within the Clean Plant Network work with fruit trees, grapes, citrus, berries, hops and roses. Universities in the sweet potato group include the LSU AgCenter, North Carolina State University, the University of California Davis, Mississippi State University, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff and the University of Hawaii.

Olivia McClure