US (WI): World's potato varieties stored in bank
Not many people know that in Wisconsin is located the world's largest collection of wild and cultivated potato species.
The genebank is a repository of thousands of seeds and cultivars collected throughout the US and world over more than six decades. The oldest potato seeds at the genebank, which was established by Wisconsin potato farmers in 1948, date back to the early 1950s.
The idea is for the genebank to preserve and evaluate different plant varieties and then distribute them to researchers.
Scientists such as Shelley Jansky need access to genetic diversity to develop new varieties that are resistant to pests and extreme weather. She's working on solving the problem of verticillium wilt, a common fungus in the soil. To solve the problem, potato farmers must inject chemicals in their farm fields before planting their crops.
Through the potato genebank, Jansky has found a wild species of potato from South America that's mostly immune to verticillium wilt.
"It's a tremendous resource that's right at my fingertips. I call them and say, 'Can you send me this, this and this' and they send me seeds in the mail," said Jansky, a U.S. Department of Agriculture research scientist and associate professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jansky also is looking at starch qualities of potatoes in an effort to combat the growing problem of obesity.
"What we're interested in doing is finding potato starch that's not as digestible, that acts more like a fiber than instant energy. It's more important for us to get fiber than instant glucose, and we're finding wild varieties that have different starches," Jansky said.
Why go to all this trouble? Because potatoes are the most valuable vegetable in the U.S. - $4 billion in potato chips alone. And potatoes are considered the fourth most important crop worldwide, behind rice, wheat and corn.
David Spooner, a UW-Madison horticulture professor, has collected many of the potato varieties housed in the genebank. He has been a potato collector and taxonomist for 27 years, making 14 potato-collecting expeditions in the United States and Latin America. Now some countries no longer allow germ plasm collections, and that makes the Sturgeon Bay facility even more important because of its diverse pool of varieties.
"The idea is to classify them so we can know more about them and can advise potato breeders to use them in their breeding work," Spooner said.
The bank makes possible research into diseases such as blight and zebra chip. Successful research of this kind helps to drive down the costs facing farmers, as they no longer have to spend so much on combating pests and diseases.
Source: jsonline.com
