Chinese Bulletin of Botany ›› 2021, Vol. 56 ›› Issue (5): 516-519.DOI: 10.11983/CBB21151

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Conquering the Summit: A New Era Towards Hybrid Seed Potato Breeding

Cao Xu*()   

  1. State Key Laboratory of Plant Genomics, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
  • Received:2021-09-02 Accepted:2021-09-16 Online:2021-09-01 Published:2021-09-17
  • Contact: Cao Xu

Abstract: Modern cultivated potato (Solanum tuberosum) is a clonally propagated autotetraploid, with highly heterozygous genome, complex genetic background, and severe inbreeding depression, making it difficult to combine eminent traits and resulting in a long breeding cycle and the dilemma of ‘genetic stagnation’ of potato hybrid breeding. Moreover, clonal propagation leads to low reproduction coefficient, high cost of storage and transportation, whereas tubers are easy to carry viruses and pests, which have hindered the development of potato industry for a long time. Recently a team led by Sanwen Huang in Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, successfully use genome design to develop the pure and fertile potato lines and thereby the hybrid F1, reinvent potato from a clonally propagated tetraploid into a seed-propagated diploid. This work is a milestone in potato breeding, that starts a new era of genome design and rapid potato breeding.

Key words: potato, genome design, inbred line, hybrid breeding