By Greg Booth

Crookston, Minn. ­ Northwest Minnesota potato growers are happy there's a local branch of the bank nearby. With help from AURI, the Minnesota potato tissue culture bank is now safely housed at the University of Minnesota-Crookston campus.

Producers like Scott Piper, who raises 700 acres of seed potatoes near Williams, Minn., rely on the bank for new potato varieties. When a producer wants to try a new variety, "reaction time is so much quicker," with a local bank, Pieper says. "You're buying time. ... Right now a guy is looking for a variety he read about in a magazine, a New York variety. I'm talking with people at Cornell University to send a couple of tubes (with starter plants) over."

The bank also provides some insurance against a major threat to northwest Minnesota's lucrative seed potato industry ( viruses. In the field, plants start out as the growing tips on potatoes and can pick up viral diseases. In the lab, the growing tips are cultivated in test tubes and can be treated with heat or chemicals to eliminate disease.

Potato tissue culture banks provide a "clean starting point," says Darrell Anderson, of Certified Potato Growers in East Grand Forks, Minn. In the controlled environment, technicians can diagnose and eliminate viruses. But samples still must be tested and retested to make sure they're disease-free. "You can spend a good six to eight months working with something to clean it up."

From the cleaned stock, plants can be grown, cut and multiplied indefinitely. With the bank's technology, cuttings can be cleaned and multiplied in two years, where once it took five to six years for growers to produce adequate seed stock, Pieper says.

The bank, about the size of a large refrigerator, contains specialized equipment to control lighting, temperature and ventilation. The growth chamber also keeps the valuable young plants msecure. Cuttings have limited growth in the test tubes and must be transferred monthly. Grown in a mixture of distilled water, plant food and a gelling agent, the cuttings are under lights 12 hours a day in clean, consistent conditions kept at 70 degrees.

Three Minnesota seed potato growers have already used the bank, which is available to everyone and "provides a contact with other states as well," Anderson says. "One grower might want to bring in a variety from another bank, and they could house it here."

The bank's location in Minnesota's potato-growing northwest is "a psychological reassurance" for growers, Pieper adds. "It's there, you know the people, you trust them, you trust the integrity of the area. You have to be careful when you're buying seed."

With the bank close to the industry, "it's a lot more accessible to the nucleus of people that actually use it. Our material all derives from tissue culture somewhere, and when we see something, when another state has a clone or particular variety that may be better than what we have, we can react quicker."

Minnesota's potato industry ranks third in the country, adding important dollars and jobs to the state's economy. And the bank provides some safety for that industry, Pieper says. "If something goes wrong, you've got someplace to start from again. That's the biggest asset. If the state comes in and shuts you down (because of disease), where do you start? It's very critical to the industry that we have this."