Project
Cold stress in potato (ColSol): unravelling stress tolerance mechanisms for climate resilient potatoes
Potato is the most important non-grain food crop in the world. Although potato evolved in the equatorial Andes, its spread into numerous geographic locations and ecological niches in South and middle America has generated a rich diversity for both biotic and abiotic stress tolerance. However, modern potato varieties remain susceptible to abiotic stresses such as temperature and drought stress.
An environmental stress that also negatively impacts potato production, but has received relatively little attention, is cold temperature. Agronomic practices such as late planting can mitigate the effects of early season cold stress. However, there are many potential advantages of early planting, combined with incorporating cold tolerance. These include a longer growing season resulting in a higher yield, allowing additional cropping cycles in northern latitudes and evasion of summer season high temperature/drought stress in the south. Cold stress tolerance is even more critical when using true potato seeds, which is an emerging important technology for growing both diploid and tetraploid hybrids. Despite an overall increase in global temperatures due to climate change, the incidence of extreme weather events including early-season cold temperatures is increasing.
In ColSol we will study the effects of cold stress on potato development combining high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) approaches both with unbiased genetic approaches and with hypothesis-driven investigations at the physiological and molecular levels. For this, we will deploy diverse plant material resources from our universities, genebanks and industry partners. In 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 multi-year 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.