Potatoes, the staple of many around the world, including in India, are heading for a much healthier makeover. Scientists are experimenting to make potato disease-free, more nutritious and a weather-proof crop. Scientists from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, have created a potato super pangenome to identify genetic traits that can help produce the next super-potato.
The scientists have assembled the genome sequences of nearly 300 varieties of potatoes and its wild relatives. Towards that end, they are mapping the pangenome of the potato, which will capture the complete genetic diversity within a species, with a super-pangenome mapping the same in multiple species of potatoes. The researchers say the super-pangenome would shed light on the potato’s genetic diversity and what kinds of genetic traits could potentially be bred into our modern-day crop to make it better.
The super-pangenome involves 60 species of potatoes—the most extensive collection of genome sequence data for the potato and its relatives to date, according to the researchers. In the process of creating the potato pangenome and the super-pangenome, the researchers took to supercomputers to analyse information from public databases, which included gene banks in the US, Peru and Canada.
The researchers believe potato pangenome would provide details spanning centuries on evolution of potato, which is found to have been domesticated by the indigenous population scattered in the mountains of southern Peru about 10,000 years ago. However, the data eventually obtained is expected to be valuable in identifying specific genes that could lead to the super-potato using gene editing technology.