Dissecting cold tolerance mechanisms in potato and their cross-talk with tuberisation

Potato is regarded as a cold sensitive crop and suffers cold stress especially in (tuber) seedling stage in late spring. Although some researches have already been done to study cold or freezing tolerance of potato (van Swaaij, 1986), very little is known about the impact of cold on potato development and tuberisation. Recently, genes in the tuberisation pathway were reported to directly affect drought and heat responses in potato and their homologues in Arabidopsis were suggested to be involved in cold tolerance through CBF-COR pathway. These results indicated the possible link between cold response and tuber development. The objective of this proposed research is to have a better understanding of potato cold tolerance mechanism and how it interacts with tuber traits thus to breed cold tolerance potato without negatively impacting on yield. view of the sensitivity to abiotic stress at early developmental stages and the increasing interests in using true potato seeds, we will focus our initial research on the response of in vitro plantlets and seedlings to low Temperatures.This will allow very detailed investigation of a large panel of more than 150 genotypes using HTP facilities recently installed at the host universities. Subsequently, cold stress during other developmental stages, such tuberisation onset and bulking stages, will be investigated and the effect of the stress assessed in multi-location and multiyear field trials. In addition to deepening the biological understanding of cold stress tolerance in potato, the results will provide concrete leads for breeding varieties with higher stress tolerance in both hybrid and conventional breeding.