‘NASPOT 11’, a Sweetpotato Cultivar Bred by a Participatory Plant-breeding Approach in Uganda

Abstract

The sweetpotato [Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam.] cultivar NASPOT 11 (Namulonge Sweetpotato 11) was approved for release by the Ugandan Plant Variety Release Committee in Apr. 2010 (Mwanga et al., 2010). This is the fifth time the sweetpotato breeding program in Uganda has officially released sweetpotato cultivars. The program released 19 cultivars between 1995 and 1999 (Mwanga et al., 2009), but to the best of our knowledge, ‘NASPOT 11’ represents the first sweetpotato cultivar bred from segregating populations by participatory plant breeding (PPB) for Africa and perhaps the world (Gibson et al., 2008; Mwanga et al., 2010). ‘NASPOT 11’ has acceptable storage root shape (long elliptic) when grown in light soils, has high dry matter (DM) ( 34%), and good to excellent consumer acceptance, depending on growth conditions. The cultivar has moderate to high field resistance to sweetpotato virus disease (SPVD) and Alternaria bataticola blight. Both diseases can be devastating, causing high storage root yield losses (50% to 90%) in susceptible clones (Gibson et al., 1998; Loebenstein et al., 2009; Osiru et al., 2009). Therefore, in terms of resistance to diseases, ‘NASPOT 11’ is superior to other previously released cultivars (Tables 1 through 3). Storage root yields exceeded 10 t ha on-farm under good growing conditions (Tables 2 and 3) compared with the average national storage root yield of 4.0 t ha (International Potato Center, 1999). Here we report the release of ‘NASPOT 11’, which provides consumers and farmers with a new cultivar to contribute to food security in the farming and food systems of Uganda.