Understanding genetic mechanisms of complex traits to improve potato breeding

Cultivated potato plays a crucial role in addressing world food security. With the need to feed a growing population under changing climatic conditions comes the need for development of better adapted varieties with higher yield and quality traits. Breeding improved potato varieties requires an understanding of the genotype-phenotype relationship. It has typically been a very lengthy process, focused on time-consuming and labour-intensive traditional phenotyping techniques and their use in selection for improving commercial traits. While there have been major developments in the ability to create genetic profiles of potato varieties, there have been very few genomics-assisted breeding programs due to limited understanding of the molecular basis of traits, creating an urgent need to develop novel methodological approaches to improve our ability to measure complex traits in large-scale field studies and to understand their molecular bases.

Building on our extensive datasets spanning many years of field trials with a diverse tetraploid germplasm collection, this project will contribute to world food security by understanding the genetic basis of a variety of commercial and underlying physiological traits and their interactions with environmental factors, with a particular focus on understanding canopy architecture for the development of high yielding varieties. Conducting genetic association analysis of potato canopy trait data, this work will demonstrate the application of new methods to improve genotype-phenotype association studies in autotetraploid species such as potato, including the use of imaging techniques for high throughput phenotyping in the field, facilitating high-resolution trait mapping. In summary, this project will contribute essential new techniques and knowledge to inform the development of robust new potato varieties in the face of climate change