Potato Review

54 POTATO REVIEW MAY/JUNE 2022 INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH A walk on the wild wide RESEARCHERS based in Hawaii, the US mainland and London have stated in a Food and Energy Security paper that wild relatives of potato may bolster its adaptation to new niches under future climate scenarios. e researchers say that up to 12.5% of the current cultivated potato climate will shift into novel regions by 2070. Michael Kantar, an assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii and one of the co-authors of the paper, said that by identifying useful traits— like local adaptability and climate exibility— in some of the dozens of wild varieties of potatoes (and howwell they interbreed), researchers could help breeders cut down on the time and cost to develop new cultivars. “Traditionally, if you have 72 potential species of potatoes and then take 10 samples and cross them back to your favorite cultivar, then you would assess in multiple regions — that’s a lot of time and cost,” he said, adding that starting with knowledge what crosses might successfully crossbreed would cut down on the number of trial plants needed.” Nathan Fumia, a researcher at the Department of Tropical Plant and Soil Science, University of Hawaii in Honolulu and another co-author on the paper says most potatoes, wild and domesticated, have been sequenced in some way. Another paper, also authored by Nathan, called “Interactions between breeding system and ploidy a ect niche breadth in Solanum” was published in Royal Society Open Science and looked at a wide range of potato species and their phylogenetics, that is, the evolutionary history and relationships among individuals or groups of organisms. “By looking at phylogenetics we were looking for a proxy for if it can be interbred: if it is more closely related, it is more likely it can be interbred,” Nathan said. Nathan and his co-authors found that decoupling geographical range and niche diversity, would help identify species that may be of particular interest for crop adaptation to a changing climate. “ at was something we saw was missing in the literature and this was the framework for what we looked at in the other paper,” he said. Nathan Fumia. Michael Kantar. Genome sequencing completion SCIENTISTS at Germany’sMax Planck Institute for Plant Breeding in Cologne and the Ludwig- Maximilians-Universität München have announced the completion of whole genome sequencing of the potato, an advancement that paves the way for the breeding of new varieties. e research has been carried out at the computational genetics lab of Korbinian Schneeberger, who said: “ e potato is becoming more and more integral to diets worldwide including even Asian countries like China where rice is the traditional staple food. Building on this work, we can now implement genome-assisted breeding of new potato varieties that will be more productive and also resistant to climate change – this could have a huge impact on delivering food security in the decades to come.”