The Royal Irish Academy will be hosting a public lecture on the subject of the Irish Famine pathogen.

Professor Jean Ristaino will present ‘Tracking a Plant Killer: Historical and Scientific Reflections on the Irish Famine Pathogen’ on Tuesday 20 August from 6pm until 7.30pm at the Dawson Street science building in Dublin.

The “dynamic” lecture will explore the migrations and spread of the pathogen Phytophthora infestans, which entered the shores of Ireland in 1845 and devastated the potato crop.

Two years prior, the same plant pathogen had caused potato blight in the northeast region of the United States.

The lecture organisers said potato blight “is not a thing of the past, it still causes plant disease globally and growers in Ireland have to spray fungicides to manage the disease".

“In Ireland, the pathogen left devastation in its wake - a country of eight million lost one quarter of its population to death and emigration.”

Professor Ristaino

Jean Ristaino is a William Neal Reynolds distinguished professor at North Carolina State University.

Ristaino studies modern and historic late blight outbreaks and her work has tracked the migration of P. infestans from its ancestral home in the Andes to the US and Europe.

In recent years, modern DNA technology has helped track the identity of the original outbreak strain and its global migration.

Her work in Ireland, while researching for her book The Potato Plague involves deploying technology to detect P. ramorum and P. kernoviae on larch and rhododendrom, which has killed trees in Ireland.