A Dundee research institute announced on Monday that it will study genetic mutation in potatoes and create a new database with the results, which could lead to improved varieties of one of the world's most important foods.

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After wheat and rice, potato is the world's third most important food crop. By 2020 it is estimated that more than two billion people worldwide will depend on potato for food, feed, or income, however, industrial food production has severely narrowed the genetic diversity of the world's most widely used food crops, and projects such as this one may be necessary to ensure improvements are made and new plants are developed to resist the challenges of the future.

Furthermore, researchers behind the new research said the genetic study of potato has lagged behind many other plant crops. The three year project was set up through a £382,000 funding grant from BBSRC, and will see researchers at the James Hutton Institute develop the first 'library' of potato mutants which can be used as a resource for further genetics research and development of agriculturally valuable strains.

Dr Glenn Bryan, who will lead the project, said, "Potato, despite its global importance as a crop, has never been subjected to the same types of mutational analysis as models and other crop plants. By making a library of mutants and using the genome sequence we can make great progress in understanding potato traits.

"This is a very exciting time. We have some nice preliminary data but the grant allows us to do this on a much larger scale and I am excited to see our first mutant panel being developed in the near future. This should lead to several new collaborative links."

For any plant or animal some mutation of the genetic code occurs naturally, and in plant crops any resulting changes in the function of one or more genes can result in beneficial traits. Developing mutants with desirable traits can therefore be a useful tool for crop scientists looking to breed those characteristics into a plant population.

However in potato this can be difficult as many species are 'tetraploid', meaning they have four copies of each gene, whereas most plants and animals only have two copies. Creating a potato plant that has a mutated version of all four copies of any one gene is extremely hard.

In order to address this, Dr Bryan's team plan to use a 'diploid' species of potato, with two copies of genes, called Solanum verrucosum for their work. The mutant panel will be assessed for variation in traits relevant to potato breeding such as; tuber characteristics, plant architecture traits, and tuber sprouting and a panel of around 100 interesting mutants will be selected for further study.

Dr Bryan said some interesting mutations have already been discovered in pilot experiments; these will be studied as part of the grant to test out a new approach for isolating mutated genes.