The genetic basis of inbreeding depression in potato

• 来源期刊: 中国科学基金（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2019,（1）
• 页码范围: 32
• 页数: 1页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

With the support by the National Natural Science Foundation of China,the research team led by Prof.Huang SanWen (黄三文) at the Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen,Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences,deciphered the genetic basis of inbreeding depression in potato,which was published in Nature Genetics (2019,51:374-378). The adverse effects of inbreeding were first documented by Charles Darwin,through extensive experiments on plants.Inbreeding depression in clonally propagated plants is expected to be more severe than that in seed plants,as more deleterious mutations have accumulated during asexual reproduction while purging of these mutations by recombination is limited.Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is the most important tuber crop worldwide,but its improvement is slow due to tetrasomic inheritance.Moreover,its clonal propagation bears a considerable carbon footprint.To overcome these drawbacks,Prof.Huang collaborated with the domestic and foreign organizations to initiate "The Upotato Project",aiming to re-domesticate potato into an inbred line-based diploid crop propagated by seeds.However,severe inbreeding depression has hampered the development of elite inbred lines and therefore there is a need to understand its genetic basis.