Ikram Bashir
Universidade Federal de Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
Screening wild potatoes under abiotic stresses towards a climate proof potato
Potato, the most important non-grain food crop, is highly sensitive to abiotic stresses. The crop ideal growing conditions are constrained to temperate or high elevation areas, likely to be heavily impacted by climate change. Conversely, potato genepool comprises a set of 107 wild species adapted to a broad range of environments. Screening these species is a key to develop future varieties adapted to hotter or dryer scenarios. Based on this background, my research focus on screening wild potato germplasm for tolerance to abiotic stresses. To accomplish this goal, wild potatoes, dihaploids and cultivars were grown in controlled environmental conditions to evaluate morphological, agronomic, and physiological responses under control (14-24oC) and heat stress (24-34oC). For drought, the germplasm was screened using osmotic pressure agents. Preliminary results on heat stress found some dihaploid Solanum tuberosum and wild S. chacoense accessions outperforming allotetraploid S. tuberosum cultivars and most of S. commersonii genotypes. Concerning the drought exposure, few accessions of S. chacoense recovered and even tolerated the stress, whereas S. commersonii ones presented moderate tolerance and a higher recovery rate. Contrariwise, dihaploid and allotetraploid S. tuberosum accessions were highly sensitive and most of them could not survive. The screened germplasm will be genotyped using an array with calls at 35K SNP loci. The phenotyping and genotyping data will be analyzed together in a quest for SNPs linked to the desirable traits. Then, the best performing genotypes will be moved into the potato breeding pipeline towards developing novel climate-proof potato varieties based on marker-assisted selection.
23 сен 2024
