Did you know that the potato was popular in Europe as an omamental plant before we human beings realised that it was edible? Now among the most widely produced tuber crops worldwide, potatoes are increasingly becoming more and more integral to diets across the globe.
While the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s saw a large increase in the yields of many major crops such as rice and wheat, there has been no such comparable boost with respect to the potato. Even though there have been efforts to breed new varieties of potatoes that will have a higher yield, these efforts have remained largely unsuccessful.
Four copies, not two
The reason for this is simple. While human beings inherit one copy of every chromosome from both the mother and the father, potatoes inherit two copies of each chromosome from each parent. The fact that potatoes are a species with four copies of each chromosome makes it challenging and time-consuming to generate new varieties that have the desired properties.
In fact, reconstructing the potato genome has proved to be a bigger technical challenge than what was the case for the human genome, which was first released more than 20 years ago. A team of scientists at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen and the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany, have finally decoded the highly complex genome of the potato for the first time.
Step towards food security?
Rather than trying to differentiate the four chromosome copies from each other, the researchers sequenced the DNA of a large number of individual pollen cells. This allowed the scientists to not only reduce the complexity of the problem, but also reconstruct the sequence of the entire genome finally.
By being able to identify gene variants that have desirable and undesirable traits, scientists will now be able to incorporate them or exclude them during breeding. This new knowledge, published in Nature Genetics in March, can thus improve the efforts to provide superior varieties of potatoes and might also be an important step towards global food security.
Picture Credit : Google
