Reinventing potato from a clonally propagated tetraploid into a diploid seed crop is an essential innovation in agriculture. Due to the numerous deleterious mutations hidden in the potato genome, developing highly homozygous inbred lines is still a big challenge. This research group constructed the pipeline of genome design of hybrid potato breeding, including the percentage of genome homozygosity and the number of deleterious mutations in the starting material, the number of segregation distortions in the S1 population, the haplotype information to infer the break of tight linkage between beneficial and deleterious alleles, and the genome complementarity of the parental lines. They employed genome design to develop a generation of pure and fertile potato lines and, thereby, the uniform, vigorous F1 hybrids. This study transforms potato breeding from a slow, non-accumulative mode into a fast-iterative one, thereby potentiating a broad spectrum of benefits to farmers and consumers.

Schematic diagram of genome design for hybrid potato breeding

Comparison of potato tuber and seeds