b"LookingTHE WORDS DIPLOIDS and true potato seeds has been popping up a lot in the potato research and breeding worlds. And while it may seem like something far off in the future, its coming, and it has the potato breeding industry looking closer at Towardsjust how that future may look.Essentially, we need to work together. And there's a lot of room to work in precompetitive space. We're going to end with a sort of call to action that says, okay, let's try to band together as a potato a Diploidcommunity and solve some of these big problems that are too big for any one group, Josh Parsons, research development associate and principal scientist with FritoLay, explains at the virtual Potato Association of America annual meeting on July 26, 2021.Future Diploids are meant to make potato breeding more efficient as there are fewer copies of chromosomes in them for crossing, making for more predictable breeding outcomes. In a diploid variety there are two copies of chromosomes, while traditional tetraploid potato varieties have four copies of each chromosome. Genes in potato are typically very heterozygous, meaning that The potato breeding worldyou can get multiple combinations of genes within each set of chromosomes. If you cross two heterozygous plants, you can get is taking in the wholea fair amount of variation within the family, Dennis Halterman, research geneticist with the United States Department of picture when it comes Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service, says during a to diploids.BY: ASHLEY ROBINSON presentation at the meeting.However, most diploid potatoes are incompatible. Meaning they wont produce true potato seed when pollen from an individual plant is placed on flowers of the same plant, Halterman says. The trick now is to introduce these self-compatibility genes into the parents that we want to use for diploid potato breeding. Self-compatibility is important because remember that we want to make the plants as homozygous as possible, he explains.Once self-compatibility genes are introduced, and the variety become highly homozygous inbred lines, they become parents. In this breeding scheme, two inbred lines are crossed to generate true potato seed of a new variety.In order to rapidly increase the number of individuals that we use to plant a crop, we rely on starting from seed derived from plants grown in greenhouses where disease pressure is low, instead of relying on seed tubers coming out of the field, Halterman explains. He adds this immensely speeds up the potato seed duplication process.Using true potato seeds from diploids helps reduce disease risk. Seed tubers can carry disease and can transfer it on to future crops. There are also storage concerns as seed tubers must be stored correctly in order to not cause disease.The potatoes can only be stored for one crop year, you could store them over the winter, but you can't store them another year. If you want to maintain the varieties, you have to maintain them in tissue culture, Amy Charkowski, a professor in the plant 30SPUDSMART.COM Fall 2021"