...the Mas­ter of Potato Blight by Merry — More than 150 years af­ter the his­toric Irish potato famine, the deadly pathogen re­spon­si­ble for potato blight, Phy­toph­thora in­fes­tans, is now de­stroy­ing more than $3 bil­lion worth of pota­toes each year. What is the se­cret of it's path­o­genic suc­cess? Hop­ing to find some an­swers in its genome, a team of 96 re­searchers have se­quenced vir­tu­ally its en­tire 240 Mb genome.