Institut für Pflanzenschutz in Ackerbau und Grünland
The POMORROW project aims to enhance the sustainability and resilience of potato by developing all of the components required for an efficient exploitation of potato genetic resources (PGR) ensuring future breeding gain. While safe-guarding PGR has a merit on its own, it is only by use in crop improvement programs that PGR unfurl their full potential as reservoir of genetic variation required for addressing future challenges in crop production. The potato collections of the German Federal Ex situ Gene Bank (GLKS) at IPK will be completely genotyped. A POMORROW core collection (PCC) of 600 entries will be established and extensively phenotyped for emerging and underexplored traits that are of particular relevance for potato production under future environmental and regulatory constraints. Traits include e.g. drought tolerance and its interaction with response to arbuscular mycorrhiza (AM), nutrient use efficiency, nutritional value, as well as resistance to late blight, stolbur/Arsenophonus, and potato viruses. Association genetics in PCC as well as novel diploid community germplasm resources will enable identification and validation of valuable alleles for potato breeding. In order to facilitate the use of genetic resources for breeding, new biotechnological tools for transgene-free gene editing are investigated and developed. Finally, the potato breeders’ toolbox will be complemented by predictive breeding approaches that enable for the first time enable the exploitation of minor effect loci for potato improvement with PGR. Taken together, POMORROW develops and applies conventional and new breeding techniques for potato germplasm enhancement by exploiting genetic resources, which enables potato breeding to react quickly to new challenges posed by climate change and the bioeconomy.
Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space
