晚疫病,由病原体致病疫霉引起的,是一种影响全球马铃薯生产的毁灭性疾病,在非洲的不利影响,在非洲,杀菌剂的获取有限加剧了其影响。晚疫病的爆发导致产量下降,并给马铃薯农民和农业系统带来巨大的经济损失。抗病马铃薯品种的开发,适合非洲农业生态条件,为减轻晚疫病对马铃薯种植的破坏性影响提供了可行的解决方案。导致这项研究,两个消费者偏好的品种,维多利亚和香吉,具有对晚疫病的高易感性的目标是通过基因工程赋予晚疫病抗性。这是通过插入来自马铃薯野生近缘种的R基因来实现的,这些基因显示出对该病的抗性。在乌干达和肯尼亚的三个地点进行了为期8年的20次实验田间试验,一直观察到赋予对晚疫病抗性的预期效果。在这项研究中,与在相同农业生态条件下生长的非转基因对照相比,我们评估了遗传转化是否对马铃薯块茎的营养和抗营养成分产生了任何明显的意外影响。对从乌干达和肯尼亚三个地点的监管试验收获的商业大小的马铃薯块茎进行组成评估。使用比较转基因和非转基因样品的双向方差分析进行统计学分析。总的来说,结果表明,转基因和非转基因样品表现出相似的营养和抗营养成分水平。如现有文献和马铃薯组成数据库中所记录的,在所分析的组分的水平中检测到的变化落在预期范围内。因此,我们得出的结论是,转基因和非转基因马铃薯块茎的营养和抗营养成分在生物学上没有显着差异。
Late blight, caused by the pathogen Phytophthora infestans, is a devastating disease affecting potato production globally, with adverse effects in Africa where limited access to fungicides exacerbates its impact. Outbreaks of late blight lead to reduced yields and substantial economic losses to potato farmers and agricultural systems. The development of resistant potato varieties, tailored to African agroecological conditions, offers a viable solution in mitigating the devastating effects of late blight on potato cultivation. Leading to this study, two consumer-preferred varieties, Victoria and Shangi, with high susceptibility to late blight were targeted for conferring late blight resistance through genetic engineering. This was achieved by inserting R genes from wild relatives of potato displaying resistance to the disease. The intended effect of conferring resistance to the late blight disease has been consistently observed over twenty experimental field trials spanning 8 years at three locations in Uganda and Kenya. In this study, we assessed whether the genetic transformation has led to any significant unintended effects on the nutritional and anti-nutritional composition of potato tubers compared to the non-transgenic controls grown under the same agroecological conditions. The compositional assessments were conducted on commercial-size potato tubers harvested from regulatory trials at three locations in Uganda and Kenya. Statistical analysis was conducted using two-way analysis of variance comparing transgenic and non-transgenic samples. Overall, the results showed that the transgenic and non-transgenic samples exhibited similar levels of nutritional and antinutritional components. Variations detected in the levels of the analysed components fell within the expected ranges as documented in existing literature and potato composition databases. Thus, we conclude that there are no biologically significant differences in the nutritional and anti-nutritional composition of transgenic and non-transgenic potato tubers engineered for resistance to late blight.