Potato has a variety of reproductive uniquenesses besides its clonal propagation by tubers. These traits are controlled by a different kind of genetic control. The reproductive information has been applied to enable interspecific hybridization to enhance valuable traits, such as disease and pest resistances, from the tuber-bearing Solanum gene pool. While progress has been made in potato breedi...

The growth and tuberization of potatoes (Solanum tuberosum L.) maintained for 6 weeks under four different regimes of continuous irradiance were compared to plants given 12 hours light and 12 hours dark. Treatments included: (a) continuous photosynthetic photon flux of 200 micromoles per square meter per second cool-white fluorescent (CWF); (b) continuous 400 micromoles per square meter per s...

Strigolactones are a recently identified class of hormone that regulate multiple aspects of plant development. The DWARF14 (D14) α/β fold protein has been identified as a strigolactone receptor, which can act through the SCFMAX2 ubiquitin ligase, but the universality of this mechanism is not clear. Multiple proteins have been suggested as targets for strigolactone signalling, including both dir...

Hamedan province is one of the main potato growing areas in Iran. Potaoto scab disease caused by Streptomyces spp. is one of the prevalent and important diseases of potato in this provice. Potato tubers with symptoms of scab diseases including raised and deep or shallow pitted lesion were collected from potato growing area in this region. A total of 20 and 25 strains of Streptomyces were isolat...

Sweet potato belongs to Ipomoea series batatas and is thought to have originated in Central America and Northern South America. World sweet potato production is around 106 million tons in an area of about 8.1 million ha. Asia is the world’s largest sweet potato-producing region and China is the world’s leading sweet potato-producing country accounting for about 76% of production. Sweet potato h...

Colorado potato beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata Say) is the leading insect pest of potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) in northern latitudes. Host plant resistance is an important tool in an integrated pest management program for controlling insect pests. Field studies were conducted to compare natural host plant resistance mechanisms (glandular trichomes and Solanum chacoense Bitter-derived resist...

Sweet potato chlorotic stunt virus (SPCSV) was first detected in China in 2010, and several partial sequences have been determined for Chinese SPCSV isolates. This report describes the complete genome sequences of two SPCSV isolates from the Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces and will be valuable for understanding the characteristics of SPCSVs in China.

References 1 Greiner, S. et al. (1999) Ectopic expression of a tobacco invertase inhibitor homolog prevents cold-induced sweetening of potato tubers. Nat. Biotechnol. 17, 708–711 2 Hemberg, T. (1985) Potato rest. In Potato Physiology (Li, P.H., ed.), pp. 353–388, Academic Press 3 Suttle, J.C. (1995) Postharvest changes in endogenous ABA levels and ABA metabolism in relation to dormancy in potat...

BACKGROUND Patatins encoded by a multi-gene family are one of the major storage glycoproteins in potato tubers. Potato tubers have recently emerged as bioreactors for the production of human therapeutic glycoproteins (vaccines). Increasing the yield of recombinant proteins, targeting the produced proteins to specific cellular compartments, and diminishing expensive protein purification steps ar...