The sensitive potato

One of the world’s most common starch-crops – the potato – is a demand and sensitive crop. Because potatoes are grown using seed potatoes, potatoes are practically each other’s clones, and diseases have had ample time and possibility to adapt to the crop. This means that potatoes are extremely susceptible to potato fungi, that has been the arch enemy of potatoes since the 1860ies.

Among other things, this makes ecological potato farming troublesome. In Denmark, it is practically only possible to grow the earliest sorts that can be harvested in the spring before the fungi attacks begin – without the use of fungicides. Larger, starchy potatoes that spend longer time underground, have a high demand for pesticides to overcome the fungi. Even though potatoes only take up about around two per cent of the Danish agricultural area, 14 per cent of the total amount of pesticides are used on them.

GMO can make pesticides redundant – but aren’t allowed

With today’s knowledge about genetics and gene modification tools like CRISPR, scientist would quickly and relatively easy be able to make popular and well-known potato sorts resistant against potato fungi. However, the EU GMO directive makes it difficult and very unattractive to grow genetically modified crops in Europe. This is a shame, says Kåre Lehmann Nielsen, who estimates that up to 90 percent of today’s pesticides used on potatoes could be made redundant by tweaking minor element of the well-known potatoes’ genetic code.

Thus, the solution to the sensitive potatoes has to be found using a somewhat slower method. In order to develop a sustainable and resistant potato that can be farmed legally, it has to be bred and developed the old-fashioned way by crossing different sorts of potato plants to foster the right properties.

This is a very time-consuming labour. Therefore, Kåre Lehmann Nielsen and his colleagues are using genomic selection to make resistant potato-breeding faster and easier. This will speed up the process and does not involve any type of gene editing.

- When you ennoble and cross different varieties, your success rate may be one in a thousand. You may quickly be able to produce a potato with a high degree of resistance, but you may not achieve the same taste, colour, yield or growth rate that you were hoping for. By using mathematical algorithms, we can skip some of the most useless combinations of plants and speed up the whole process. This means that we can quickly develop a wide variety of sustainable varieties, he says.