The nutritional value, colour and flavour of New Zealand’s potatoes can all be improved thanks to Crop & Food Research’s role in helping to sequence the potato genome by 2009.

Improvements could also be made to the environmental sustainability of crop production, says Jeanne Jacobs, who will lead our potato genomics research.

Crop & Food Research has taken up an invitation to join the international Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium and Dr Jacobs is already assisting in protocol development to ensure quality work by all parties.

The $36 million programme is led by Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands. Scientists at Wageningen and in China will each sequence two of the twelve potato chromosomes, while their colleagues at Crop & Food Research and in Scotland, Poland, Russia, Brazil, the US and India will each take one chromosome. The remaining chromosome will be sequenced by a group of laboratories in Austria, Finland and Ireland.

Knowledge of the full genome will provide huge opportunities to improve the potato crop – an important global crop with an increasing significance for developing countries.

“If you know exactly which part of the chromosome holds the genes for a particular trait, then you can precisely target crop improvements.

“The research will also yield genetic information important to the improvement of other vegetable crops that share some of their DNA sequences with potatoes,” says Dr Jacobs.

A complete sequence of any genome enables the use of the precision breeding technique developed by Crop & Food Research’s Tony Conner. Plants produced using this technique are, by definition, not transgenic. Only DNA already available to traditional plant breeders is used. The genes that cause a particular characteristic can be identified in potato germplasm banks and the best one selected to transfer precisely an improved quality into a new plant.