It suggested at a recent international symposium that this combination offers worldwide opportunities for making agriculture more sustainable, as part of integrative pest management, in which (low dose) chemicals are only used on rare occasions. After researching potatoes for a decade, scientists were able to make the potatoes resistant to Phytophtora by genetically engineering resistant genes in wild potato species (DuRPh), using research financed by the Dutch government.

The potato is the third largest food crop in the world and the most important arable crop in the Netherlands. The university said that a lot of pesticides are used on potato crops, more than on other crops. Growers use these pesticides mainly for protecting the crops against late blight, which is caused by Phytophtora infestations. This pathogen is genetically seen as very 'plastic', i.e. there is a lot of genetic variation present which make it easy for new forms of the pathogen to develop. This kind of genetically plastic pathogen can quite easily break through the defences of resistant plants.

Wageningen University said that conventional potato crops must be sprayed with fungicides 10 to 15 times a year to keep the disease at bay. This impacts the environment. Controlling late blight, and consequent and yield losses, costs Dutch growers around €100,000,000 per year. That's almost 20% of production costs. Worldwide, late blight is costing billions of dollars. 

In the ten-year DuRPh research programme, researchers have developed prototypes from potato varieties that are resistant to late blight. Effective resistance management was also developed during the research, whereby the genetic variation of the pathogen is monitored throughout the Netherlands. By combining these two approaches, the use of fungicides can be reduced by up to 80%. The research was financed by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and carried out by Wageningen University.

According to international scientists who were present at the symposium on 3 September 2015, the results from DuRPh can be used for other major food crops as well. There are more crops that have problems due to one or more pathogens, such as wheat and bananas. They suggest that wild species with resistant genes for these varieties are likely to be found. 

Resistant varieties of crops, other than potatoes, can also hold their resistance long term through multiple resistant genes from wild species being combined via genetic modification, monitoring the pathogen well and adjusting the combination of resistant genes in a timely manner. This can occur even if the pathogen is very diverse and can easily adapt to the resistance of the plant.