Eucablight : collating and analysing pathogenicity and resistance data on a European scale

The Concerted Action on potato late blight ‘Eucablight’ (www.eucablight.org) was launched in 2003 to promote collaboration between researchers across Europe and to collate the previously fragmented data on host resistance to late blight and characterization of populations of its causal agent, Phytophthora infestans . Fundamental to the project was the development of standardized protocols, databases and data collection tools with which data from across Europe could be centralized. The ultimate aim was to capitalize on the vast resource of data available in order to allow a pan-European analysis to be conducted. The P. infestans database is currently populated with information relating to over 15 000 isolates from 20 European countries. The host resistance database holds primary disease data, and derived statistics, from more than 50 field trials assessing mainly foliage blight resistance. The use of five standard cultivars in these trials facilitated the comparison of resistance information across years and regions. The host database is structured, and made accessible, in such a way that DSS builders can access the model parameters they need to construct locally adapted forecasting systems. In this presentation we describe the database and the data analysis tools that have been developed in this project and how they are directly applicable to other host-pathogen systems.