Finding the perfect potato: using functional genomics to improve disease resistance and tuber quality traits

Abstract

One of the best known plant disease outbreaks of all time was the Irish potato famine of 1845 to 1847 when the late blight pathogen, Phytophthora infestens, devastated the potato crop and caused more than one million deaths in Ireland. Potatoes are still plagued by disease but luckily most countries do not depend on potato as much as they did in Ireland in the 1800s. Producing disease-free potatoes, however, has come at a huge cost. To combat major diseases, such as late blight and common scab, 64 × 10 6 kg of pesticides are sprayed on potato fields each year. The costs associated with these measures are not only financial; environmental costs, although less easy to quantify, are significant and include negative impacts on natural ecosystems and the contamination of groundwater, lakes, and rivers. Our search for the "perfect" potato, i.e., one that has good processing qualities and disease resistance, has gained new momentum with the emergence of genomic technologies. Through functional genomics we will gain a better understanding of the genes responsible for tuber quality traits and those responsible for disease resistance. With a collection of desirable genes in mind, we can again use genomics as a diagnostic tool to search for these genes in the wide variety of potatoes around the world and to follow their transfer by classical breeding. This paper describes a research program currently underway in Canada that uses functional genomics to improve the potato.

Insertional Mutagenesis Using Tnt1 Retrotransposon in Potato

“…Such a dominant phenotype can be observed in T 0 transgenic lines, avoiding the selfing process. The Canadian Potato Genome Project generated 10,000 activation-tagged potato lines (Regan et al, 2006). However, the phenotypeinducing efficiency of the activation-tagging approach is not known in potato.…”

Advances in Functional Genomics and Genetic Modification of Potato

“…Some of these experiments are underway within the EU-SOL project (http://www.eu-sol.net/public). Additionally, the array is being used to address the regulation of dry matter accumulation, sugar accumulation and after-cooking darkening by a Canadian consortium (Regan et al 2006). …”

Recent advances in potato genomics, transcriptomics, and transgenicsunder drought and heat stresses: a review

“…The array was incorporated into the functional genomics program of a Canadian consortium to improve disease resistance and tuber quality traits of potato (Regan et al, 2006). Recent developments in high-throughput sequencing technologies of the whole transcriptome, known as RNASeq, permit the analysis of all transcripts in a sample for mRNA and miRNA abundance, and detection of aberrant transcripts and transcript splice variants (Wang et al, 2009b) without a prior knowledge of the transcriptome of a studied organism (Morin et al, 2008).…”