Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is one of the most important crops with a world-wide production of 370 million metric tons. The objectives of this study were (i) to create a high quality consensus sequence across the two haplotypes of a diploid clone derived from a tetraploid elite variety and assess the sequence divergence from the available potato genome assemblies, as well as among the two haplotypes; (ii) to evaluate the new assembly’s usefulness for various genomic methods and (iii) to assess the performance of phasing in diploid and tetraploid clones, using linked read sequencing technology. We used PacBio long reads coupled with 10x Genomics reads and proximity-ligation scaffolding to create the dAg1_v1.0 reference genome sequence. With a final assembly size of 812 Mb, where 750 Mb are anchored to 12 chromosomes, our assembly is larger than other available potato reference sequences and high proportions of properly paired reads were observed for clones unrelated by pedigree to dAg1. Comparisons of the new dAg1_v1.0 sequence to other potato genome sequences point out the high divergence between the different potato varieties and illustrate the potential of using dAg1_v1.0 sequence in breeding applications.

Key message Association mapping with immortalized lines of landraces offers several advantages including a high mapping resolution, as demonstrated here in maize by identifying the causal variants underlying QTL for oil content and the metabolite allantoin. Abstract Landraces are traditional varieties of crops that present a valuable yet largely untapped reservoir of genetic variation to meet future challenges of agriculture. Here, we performed association mapping in a panel comprising 358 immortalized maize lines from six European Flint landraces. Linkage disequilibrium decayed much faster in the landraces than in the elite lines included for comparison, permitting a high mapping resolution. We demonstrate this by fine-mapping a quantitative trait locus (QTL) for oil content down to the phenylalanine insertion F469 in DGAT1-2 as the causal variant. For the metabolite allantoin, related to abiotic stress response, we identified promoter polymorphisms and differential expression of an allantoinase as putative cause of variation. Our results demonstrate the power of this approach to dissect QTL potentially down to the causal variants, toward the utilization of natural or engineered alleles in breeding. Moreover, we provide guidelines for studies using ancestral landraces for crop genetic research and breeding.

Genomic selection (GS) is used in many animal and plant breeding programs to enhance genetic gain for complex traits. However, its optimal integration in clone breeding programs, for example potato, that up to now relied on phenotypic selection (PS) requires further research. In this study, we performed computer simulations based on an empirical genomic dataset of tetraploid potato to (i) investigate under a fixed budget how the weight of GS relative to PS, the stage of implementing GS, the correlation between an auxiliary trait and the target trait, the variance components, and the prediction accuracy affect the genetic gain of the target trait, (ii) determine the optimal allocation of resources maximizing the genetic gain of the target trait, and (iii) make recommendations to breeders how to implement GS in clone and especially potato breeding programs. In our simulation results, any selection strategy involving GS had a higher short-term genetic gain for the target trait than Standard-PS. In addition, we showed that implementing GS in consecutive selection stages can largely

Genomic selection (GS) is used in many animal and plant breeding programs to enhance genetic gain for complex traits. However, its optimal integration in clone breeding programs that up to now relied on phenotypic selection (PS) requires further research. The objectives of this study were to (i) investigate under a fixed budget how the weight of GS relative to PS, the stage of implementing GS, the correlation between an auxiliary trait assessed in early generations and the target trait, the variance components, and the prediction accuracy affect the genetic gain of the target trait of GS compared to PS, (ii) determine the optimal allocation of resources maximizing the genetic gain of the target trait in each selection strategy and for varying cost scenarios, and (iii) make recommendations to breeders how to implement GS in clone and especially potato breeding programs. In our simulation results, any selection strategy involving GS had a higher short-term genetic gain for the target trait than Standard-PS. In addition, we show that implementing GS in consecutive selection stages can largely enhance short-term genetic gain and recommend the breeders to implement GS at single hills and A clone stages. Furthermore, we observed for selection strategies involving GS that the optimal allocation of resources maximizing the genetic gain of the target trait differed considerably from those typically used in potato breeding programs. Therefore, our study provides new insight for breeders regarding how to optimally implement GS in a commercial potato breeding program to improve the short-term genetic gain for their target trait.