Roughly ten years ago, Dave Douches, a professor in Michigan State University’s Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences and director of MSU’s Potato Breeding and Genetics Program, led the Solanaceae Coordinated Agricultural Project (SolCAP). The project, funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA NIFA) to advance potato and tomato crops, gave rise to a new potato-breeding venture Douches has been exploring ever since.
Most potatoes grown in the world are tetraploids, meaning they have four sets of chromosomes. This makes breeding potatoes relatively difficult due to the high level of genes that must be crossed.
During his time as director of SolCAP, Douches recognized the need for finding the genetic material needed to cultivate a diploid potato, one that has just two sets of chromosomes. Both tetraploid and diploid potatoes originated from South America centuries ago, but it ultimately was the tetraploid potato that reached the global market and is what consumers typically buy today.
“It was in that project I realized we needed to think of a new way of breeding the potato at the diploid level and to capture the advantage and simplicity of using diploid genetics,” Douches said.
Diploid breeding allows for genetic advances to happen quickly. At the diploid level, scientists can edit genes with a greater probability of achieving desired traits than they can at the tetraploid level.
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Categories: Michigan, Crops, Fruits and Vegetables