Standardization of Root Excretions for Immunity Trials on the Potato Root Eelworm

Abstract

EXPERIMENTS with South American species of potato, carried out since 1941, have shown that, compared with British species, the South American plants are generally far less strongly attacked by the potato root eelworm; nor do their root excretions stimulate to the same extent the emergence of larvæ from the cysts. A full account of this work will be published in due course. It seemed desirable, however, to describe the method recently developed in an effort to test whether the differences in excretions were truly specific, and not due to variations in the vigour of the material available for test: it was thought that this might be of use in other fields of eelworm research.