Germplasm evaluation and molecular selection of potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) cultivars with disease resistance in China

Abstract

Foreground and background selections are two important aspects that need to be carefully considered by plant breeders during field selection. In this article, we used 7 disease resistance markers, including four late blight and three potato virus disease resistance gene markers, and 12 microsatellite markers to evaluate the disease resistance and genetic diversity of 76 potato cultivars in total which were collected from 15 provinces of China. The foreground selection results showed that a number of materials, clustered separately, contained more than two late blight resistance markers or pyramided late blight and virus disease resistance gene markers together. A lot of them were collected from the southwest of China. Additionally, the genetic backgrounds of all cultivars were relatively narrow and a limited number of cultivars (15.8%) contained both potato late blight and potato virus Y resistance markers. Also, only two accessions (Yunshu 103 and Lishu 7) contained both late blight and potato virus X resistance markers. In conclusion, this comprehensive evaluation of genetic resources will shed the light on potato disease resistance breeding in the future.