Abstract

Harnessing OMICS for Stress Tolerance in Potato

Virupaksh U Patil , Scientist (Senior Scale), Central Potato Research Institute

Potato is the third most important food crop of the world with a total production of >380 mt (FAOSTAT, 2014). India, presently stands second only to China with a total annual production nearing 50 mt. Our predecessors have successfully sub-tropicalized the potato crop from its temperate nature but ever expanding population, shrinking farm lands, excess utilization of lands and global warming have posed challenges for researchers to further tropicalize the crop by introducing better biotic and abiotic stress tolerance characters into potato. Breeders are trying hard to find the biotic and abiotic stress tolerance from the primary and secondary gene pools but with limited success. Application of recent advances in whole genome sequencing, gene expression analysis as well as protein and metabolite quantification enable genome-scale capturing of complex biological processes at the molecular level in potato would help to harness the gene/s involved in various biotic or abiotic stress tolerance. Utilization of potato omics data along with the crop's breeding behaviour (Field-Omics), we can further achieve great success in exploiting the gene pool for improving the potato production.