Before and after photos of the same Koto Buki Sweetpotato. 

Unmeristemmed on the left ~ Cleaned,  meristemmed on the right.

Method:  A single heavily diseased and deformed G-4 (fourth generation) Koto Buki Sweetpotato was planted as a seed sweetpotato.  The resulting cuttings were planted in pots. Some were meristemmed and some were simply kept alive and untreated. 

Two random samples were planted in the field under indentical conditions side by side, one from the meristemmed cuttings, one from the untreated cuttings.  The 2 plants were dug at the same time and all the resulting sweetpotatoes shown to illustrate the dramatic changes and differences of using meristemmed plant stock vs. non-meristemmed.  Though they were dug prematurely, they still demonstrate what meristemming can accomplish in a single generation. Had they been left a few more weeks they would have grown to ideal market size. The untreated plant retained the diseases it inheirted from the mother plant and the resulting sweetpotatoes look even worse than the one that was originally used to start them.