Identification, Characterization, and Conservation of Sweet Potato Germplasm (Ipomoea batatas L.) in West Sumatera Production Center

Abstract

Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas L.) is an important food crop in West Sumatra and potentially develops in suitable land conditions to produce various snack food industries. As one of the sweet potato production centers in Indonesia, West Sumatra has a very high diversity of germplasm. Unfortunately, the information on this diversity is not yet available. In fact, this information is pivotal to develop and produce new high-yielding sweet potato varieties. This study characterized 109 sweet potato accessions from four sweet potato production centers in West Sumatra. To find out more about the differences in each sweet potato accession, molecular identification and characterization were carried out. The second year of the research was a follow-up study to obtain (1) molecular information about the genetic diversity of sweet potatoes in the West Sumatra production centers by using the RAPD technique, (2) the collections of local varieties of sweet potato with potentially superior varieties and genetic sources of several traits or important characters, and (3) a database of kinship/genetic similarity of sweet potato varieties. The results have shown that 79 of 80 morphological characterization varieties have genetic differences. The dendrogram denotes that the accessions vary with a coefficient between 0.15 - 0.20 and are classified into 7 groups with a range of 2-38 accessions.