Water-saving potatoes (BO-26.03-001-001)

Agriculture is facing the challenge to produce more food for the growing world population with less input (water, fertilizer/nutrients, energy). Potato is one of the mos efficient food producing crops per hectare, but growing potato requires a lot of water. This project contributes to the ai mto produce more food with less input by developing tools for breeders with which drought-tolerant potato varieties can be produced that will still produce a good harvest of tubers with less water.

To achieve this goal a broad collection of potato varieties is evalauted for drought tolerance both in the field and in the greenhosue. The field evaluations at different locations and in multiple years will deliver data on growth, yield and quality.  This gives insight in the properties that are suitable alone or in combination for breeding a drought tolerant potato variety. The greenhouse trials offer insight in the mechanisms that contribute to drought tolerance. The combination of  field and greenhouse trials enables us to discover the genetic factors that are responsible for drought tolerance traits, and to determine to what extent the canges in the environment influence the effectiveness of these traits.

The project has started in 2013,  and has alreadt collected data of three different test locations with regard to growth under limited water availability. In the coming period we will link these data to genetic information in order to identify the genest that possibly contribute to drought tolerance and that can be tagged for targeted breeding. In addition we have selected in greenhouse eperiments with the aid of molecalar techniques a number of varieties  that have interesting properties for breeding of drought-tolerant varieties. Source and sink relationships in relation to sugar transport appears tob e important for the prodcution of tubers under water limited conditions. We will also explore the roles of several factors that appear to have important regulatory functions in the response of the potato plant to water shortage.