Climate-Smart Potato: An Integrated Breeding, Genomics, and Phenomics Approach

Abstract

Potato is an important source of food globally. Potatoes are among the most widely grown crop plants in the world, giving good yield under various soil and weather conditions. Yield losses of potato under current climate change keep increasing, despite the progressive increase in yield through breeding and management practices since the 1960s. Conventional breeding facilitated the development of high-quality potato with enhanced tolerance to severe environmental fluctuations such as drought, flooding, heat, and salinity. However, conventional approaches need to be complemented with advanced techniques in order to meet the increasing demands of the growing world population. The advances in marker-assisted and genomics-assisted breeding, sequencing technologies, and phenomics tools have enabled the potato improvement at a faster pace. The genomic resources have enabled the development of molecular markers associated with many important quantitative trait loci. It has also provided a clear picture of genomic variations in potato germplasm, and identified key genes for genetic engineering including genome editing. This knowledge is being utilized to facilitate the development of climate-smart potato. In this chapter, we discuss and summarize the advances in potato improvement through conventional and genomics-assisted breeding, genetic engineering, and phenomics approaches. This information could facilitate the incorporation of climate-smart traits (biotic and abiotic stresses) in modern breeding for more stable potato production with the changing climate.