A Brief History of the Impact of Potato Genetics on the Breeding of Tetraploid Potato Cultivars for Tuber Propagation

Abstract

The principal cultivated potato (Solanum tuberosum) has mainly been vegetatively propagated through its tubers. Potato breeders have therefore made planned artificial hybridizations to generate genetically unique seedlings and their clonal descendants from which to select new cultivars for tuber propagation. After the initial hybridizations, no more sexual reproduction was required to produce a successful new cultivar, which depended on choosing the correct breeding objectives and the ability to recognize a clone that met those objectives. Any impact of the new science of genetics after 1900 needed to be through the production of parental material of known genetic constitution and predictable offspring. This included making use of the many wild tuber-bearing relatives of the potato in Central and South America, as well as the abundance of landraces in South America. This review looks at the history of how potato geneticists: 1) established that the principal cultivated potato is a tetraploid that displays tetrasomic inheritance (2n = 4x = 48); 2) developed progeny tests to determine the dosage of major genes for qualitative traits in potential parents, and also progeny tests for their general combining abilities for quantitative traits; and 3) provided molecular markers for the marker assisted selection of major genes and quantitative trait alleles of large effect, and for the genomic selection of many alleles of small effect. It is argued that the concepts of population genetics are required by breeders, once a number of cycles of hybridization and cultivar production are considered for the genetic improvement of potato crops.

Efficient Genomic Prediction of Yield and Dry Matter in Hybrid Potato

“…Using model (7), across-trial BLUPs were predicted for each hybrid. Several variance ratios were also produced from this model including broad-sense heritabilities (…”

“…Each trait, model, and testing scenario were tested 100 times. Predictions were either compared to BLUEs generated from the first stage of modeling for Est 2019 and 2020 (E19 and E20, respectively) and Heelsum 2019 and 2020 (H19 and H20, respectively) or against across-trial BLUPs (AVG) produced from the Model (7).…”

“…Using the variance components from Model (7), multiple variance ratios were produced for all tuber phenotypes (Table 2). Broad-sense heritabilities ranged between 0.47-0.73 in Est and 0.55-0.82 in Heelsum, with average tuber volume being the most heritable trait over both locations.…”

“…This was conducted on dry matter content (DM), total tuber number (TN), mean tuber volume (TV), and total tuber yield (TY). Predictions were tested against average hybrid performance (AVG) produced from Model (7).…”

Homoeologous Chromosome Pairing and Alien Introgression in Backcrossing Progenies Derived from Hybrids Solanum tuberosum (+) Mexican 2x (1 EBN) B-Genome Potato Species

“…The results of introgressive breeding in potatoes depend largely on the potential of homoeologous pairing and meiotic recombination, because it predicts the success of desirable alien gene introgression into the S. tuberosum genome through subsequent backcrossing, and helps to develop introgressive hybridization schemes [3,7,48,54,77,[81][82][83]. Therefore, information about meiotic chromosome behavior in interspecific hybrids and about the peculiarities of the interaction of the A-genome of S. tuberosum and the B-genome of Mexican diploid species is important for potato introgressive breeding.…”