Most people imagine (correctly or not) that they are more complex than potatoes, but that isn’t entirely true, even for the best of us.
As you might remember from high-school biology, humans are diploid, meaning that they have two sets of chromosomes, one inherited from the father, one from the mother.
Potatoes are tetraploid: they have inherited two sets of chromosomes from each parent.
This fascinating fact has made it extremely difficult to breed potato varieties. Consequently, people may still be buying varieties that were available 100 years ago. The lack of varieties has made the plant especially vulnerable to diseases.
The grimmest case is Ireland in the 1840s, when the potato crop was wiped out by several years of tuber blight, leading to mass starvation.
Now a research team at Germany’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich) and Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Max Planck Institute) have announced that they have managed to sequence the potato genome.
This achievement will make it possible to breed new, more robust varieties of the tuber.
The researchers stated: “During the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, scientists and plant breeders succeeded in achieving large increases in the yields of many of our major crop staples like rice or wheat. However, the potato has seen no comparable boost, and efforts to breed new varieties with higher yields have remained largely unsuccessful to the current day.”
“The potato is becoming more and more integral to diets worldwide including even Asian countries like China where rice is the traditional staple food,” the institute noted in its announcement of the discovery.
“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.”
Most people imagine (correctly or not) that they are more complex than potatoes, but that isn’t entirely true, even for the best of us.
As you might remember from high-school biology, humans are diploid, meaning that they have two sets of chromosomes, one inherited from the father, one from the mother.
Potatoes are tetraploid: they have inherited two sets of chromosomes from each parent.
This fascinating fact has made it extremely difficult to breed potato varieties. Consequently, people may still be buying varieties that were available 100 years ago. The lack of varieties has made the plant especially vulnerable to diseases.
The grimmest case is Ireland in the 1840s, when the potato crop was wiped out by several years of tuber blight, leading to mass starvation.
Now a research team at Germany’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich) and Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Max Planck Institute) have announced that they have managed to sequence the potato genome.
This achievement will make it possible to breed new, more robust varieties of the tuber.
The researchers stated: “During the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, scientists and plant breeders succeeded in achieving large increases in the yields of many of our major crop staples like rice or wheat. However, the potato has seen no comparable boost, and efforts to breed new varieties with higher yields have remained largely unsuccessful to the current day.”
“The potato is becoming more and more integral to diets worldwide including even Asian countries like China where rice is the traditional staple food,” the institute noted in its announcement of the discovery.
“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.”
Richard Smoley, contributing editor for Blue Book Services, Inc., has more than 40 years of experience in magazine writing and editing, and is the former managing editor of California Farmer magazine. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford universities, he has published 12 books.
