The microscopic killer behind the Irish Potato Famine has long haunted both history books and evolutionary biology, but its fate after the catastrophe of the 1840s has remained one of the great unanswered questions in plant pathology. Now, a team of researchers led by Donikë Sejdiu and Verena J. Schuenemann of the University of Zurich and the University of Basel, working with colleagues at ETH Zurich and the University of Vienna, has recovered and sequenced ancient genomes of the potato blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans from herbarium specimens collected across Europe between 1850 and 1982. Their study, published in BMC Biology, reveals that the infamous famine lineage persisted on the continent far longer than previously appreciated, lingering into the mid-twentieth century before finally being displaced by a rival strain. The findings paint a vivid genetic picture of more than a century of pathogen evolution, competition and replacement, and they demonstrate that the pressed, dried plants gathering dust in museum collections can serve as extraordinary time capsules of infectious disease.
The story begins with the identification, in earlier ancient DNA work, of the FAM-1/HERB-1 lineage as the strain of P. infestans responsible for the devastating potato late blight epidemics of the nineteenth century, including the Irish Potato Famine that killed roughly one million people and forced another million to emigrate. That discovery, made possible by sequencing pathogen DNA preserved in infected herbarium leaves, was a landmark of paleogenomics. Yet the years that followed the famine remained a genomic black box. Scientists knew that a lineage designated US-1/Ib dominated global potato blight populations for much of the twentieth century, but when and how the transition occurred in Europe, and whether the famine strain simply faded away or was actively outcompeted, could not be resolved without genetic evidence spanning that crucial interval.
To close that gap, the researchers developed and tested a highly targeted sampling strategy for extracting pathogen DNA from herbarium material. Rather than sampling whole leaves blindly, they took tissue from four distinct locations on each of 23 historical specimens: directly from lesions, from tissue immediately adjacent to lesions, and from more distant, apparently healthy-looking areas. The logic was straightforward but had never been systematically tested for this pathogen. Because P. infestans is an oomycete, a fungus-like organism that grows invasively through host tissue, its DNA should be concentrated where the infection is most active. The team’s quantitative comparisons, including Kruskal–Wallis tests, Wilcoxon signed-rank tests and Spearman rank correlation analyses of both mitochondrial and nuclear pathogen DNA, confirmed that lesion tissue and tissue adjacent to lesions yielded by far the highest pathogen DNA content. This simple anatomical insight dramatically improves the efficiency with which precious, irreplaceable herbarium specimens can be converted into genome-scale data, minimizing the destructive sampling required for each fragment of a centuries-old plant.
With that strategy in hand, the team used state-of-the-art ancient DNA laboratory techniques and the nf-core/eager bioinformatics pipeline to sequence the recovered DNA, applying stringent mapping quality filters to ensure that only genuine pathogen reads were retained. Characteristic post-mortem DNA damage patterns, in which cytosine bases deaminate to uracil and produce excess cytosine-to-thymine substitutions at the ends of DNA fragments, confirmed the authenticity of the ancient material. In total, the researchers succeeded in reconstructing ten complete mitochondrial genomes and five nuclear genomes of historical P. infestans, which they then analyzed alongside previously published historical and modern genomes. The mitochondrial genome, being small, abundant and present in many copies per cell, proved especially amenable to recovery from degraded tissue, while the larger nuclear genomes provided additional resolution on the strain relationships.
The phylogenetic analysis of these genomes delivered the study’s headline result: the FAM-1/HERB-1 lineage, the very strain that ignited the famine, survived in Europe until at least 1946. For nearly a century after it laid waste to European potato fields, the famine strain persisted, quietly circulating in potato crops and wild hosts across the continent. Only after the Second World War does the genomic evidence indicate that it was replaced by the US-1/Ib lineage, the strain that would go on to dominate potato blight populations worldwide for decades. This finding pushes the known lifespan of the famine lineage back by generations and establishes a mid-twentieth-century replacement event as a pivotal moment in the evolutionary history of one of agriculture’s most destructive pathogens. It also suggests that lineage turnover in P. infestans can be a slow, drawn-out process rather than a rapid sweep, with old and new strains coexisting across vast geographic ranges before one finally prevails.
Beyond the blight itself, the study’s metagenomic approach, in which all DNA in a sample is sequenced rather than only DNA matching a targeted species, uncovered a genuine surprise: historical co-infections between P. infestans and Alternaria solani, the causative agent of early blight in potatoes and tomatoes. In specimens collected in 1877, 1944 and 1946, the team detected and sequenced DNA from both pathogens simultaneously, providing what appears to be the first direct genomic evidence that these two diseases plagued the same plants at the same time in the historical record. The researchers also detected DNA from Alternaria alternata, another fungal pathogen, in their samples. These co-infections not only add a fascinating ecological dimension to the study, showing that sick plants in the past, as today, could harbor multiple pathogens at once, but they also validated the broader utility of the team’s sampling strategy, since lesion-targeted sampling proved equally effective at recovering Alternaria DNA as P. infestans DNA.
The technical achievement underlying these discoveries should not be understated. Working with herbarium DNA is notoriously difficult. The specimens were dried and pressed, often without any thought to future molecular analysis, and their DNA has been subjected to more than a century of fragmentation and chemical degradation. Every milligram of tissue removed from a type specimen or a historically significant collection is a permanent loss to the museum. The new sampling protocol addresses this tension directly. By demonstrating that small amounts of tissue taken specifically from lesions and their immediate surroundings yield maximal pathogen DNA, the study gives curators and researchers a blueprint for minimally invasive sampling that maximizes scientific return while preserving the integrity of collections. The approach worked across specimens spanning more than 130 years of collection history, from specimens gathered in 1850, shortly after the famine era, to one collected as recently as 1982.
The implications extend well into the present and future. P. infestans remains a global threat to food security, with the annual cost of potato late blight, in terms of crop losses and fungicide expenditures, estimated in the billions of dollars. Modern lineages of the pathogen have repeatedly emerged and displaced older ones, most dramatically with the rise of aggressive new strains in the late twentieth century. Understanding the tempo and mode of these historical replacements, how long a dominant lineage persists, whether replacement happens gradually or in bursts, and what ecological forces drive it, is essential for predicting and managing future epidemics. The genome archive locked inside herbarium collections, which number in the tens of millions of specimens worldwide, represents a vast and largely untapped dataset for this purpose. Every major plant disease outbreak of the past few centuries likely left its genetic trace in pressed leaves stored in museum cabinets, waiting for the right sampling strategy to unlock it.
The research also highlights the growing field of museomics, the application of genomic techniques to museum specimens of all kinds. Just as ancient DNA from human bones has rewritten the story of human migrations, ancient DNA from herbarium sheets is rewriting the story of plant disease. The ability to reconstruct complete mitochondrial and, increasingly, nuclear genomes from specimens collected before the era of modern microbiology allows scientists to track pathogen evolution with a spatial and temporal resolution that no modern surveillance program can match retrospectively. In this study, specimens from different European locations and different decades served as fixed genetic checkpoints, allowing the team to place the rise and fall of specific lineages onto a concrete historical timeline anchored to real, dated, georeferenced plant samples.
The study, supervised jointly by Simon Aeschbacher of the University of Zurich and Swiss National Park and Verena J. Schuenemann, and supported by the University of Zurich’s University Research Priority Program “Evolution in Action: From Genomes to Ecosystems,” stands as a powerful demonstration of what patient, methodologically careful ancient DNA research can achieve. By combining a rational sampling design, rigorous molecular authentication and phylogenetic analysis of newly recovered and previously published genomes, the team has transformed a century and a half of scattered herbarium sheets into a coherent narrative of pathogen persistence, competition and eventual replacement. The famine strain, it turns out, did not vanish with the catastrophe it caused. It endured in Europe’s potato fields for nearly a hundred years more, shadowed at times by early blight co-infections, before the US-1/Ib lineage finally claimed its place. That forgotten century of coexistence, now made visible through ancient genomics, offers both a cautionary tale about the longevity of epidemic lineages and a promising roadmap for reading the deep history of disease hidden in the world’s natural history collections.
Subject of Research: Evolutionary history and lineage replacement of the potato late blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans in Europe after the Irish Potato Famine, reconstructed from pathogen DNA in historical herbarium specimens
Subject of Research: Biology
Article Title: Genomic insights into the evolutionary dynamics of Phytophthora infestans lineages after the Irish Potato Famine
Article References: Sejdiu, D., de Vos, J. M., Berndt, R., Matthes, K. L., Walker-Meikle, K., Aeschbacher, S., & Schuenemann, V. J. (2026). Genomic insights into the evolutionary dynamics of Phytophthora infestans lineages after the Irish Potato Famine. BMC Biology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-026-02711-7
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s12915-026-02711-7
Keywords: Phytophthora infestans, Irish Potato Famine, herbarium collections, ancient genomics, plant pathogens, museomics, FAM-1/HERB-1, US-1/Ib, Alternaria solani, co-infection, potato late blight, pathogen evolution
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Juliet Wilcox. (September 7, 2026). Genome study reveals evolution of potato blight lineages after Irish Famine. Scienmag. https://scienmag.com/genome-study-reveals-evolution-of-potato-blight-lineages-after-irish-famine/
Juliet Wilcox. “Genome study reveals evolution of potato blight lineages after Irish Famine.” Scienmag, 7 September 2026, https://scienmag.com/genome-study-reveals-evolution-of-potato-blight-lineages-after-irish-famine/. Accessed 7 September 2026.
Juliet Wilcox. “Genome study reveals evolution of potato blight lineages after Irish Famine.” Scienmag. September 7, 2026. https://scienmag.com/genome-study-reveals-evolution-of-potato-blight-lineages-after-irish-famine/
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