Canada: Scientists develop drought-resistant potatoes

Bourlaye Fofana, a researcher with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, leads a team in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, that examined wild potato varieties native to the Andes in South America that could contribute to the development of a more drought-resistant potato for North American markets. There are more than 5,000 varieties of potatoes in the world, says the Ministry of Agriculture, and this high number has reduced the genetic differences between many of them, making some potatoes less resistant to disease and climate change. We see a lot of problems because the genetic diversity among these commercially grown varieties is quite small, Bourlaye Fofana said in an interview. With climate change and heat waves, this lack of genetic diversity could be a big problem in the future. Most commercial potato varieties are of tetraploid origin: they have four copies of each chromosome in their DNA, with two copies inherited from each plant parent. Bourlaye Fofana worked with wild ...