As climate change continues to pose severe challenges to ensuring sustainable food supplies around the world, scientists from McGill University are looking for ways to improve the resilience and nutritional quality of potatoes.
As climate change continues to pose severe challenges to ensuring sustainable food supplies around the world, scientists from McGill University are looking for ways to improve the resilience and nutritional quality of potatoes. Professor Martina Strömvik and her team have created a potato super pangenome to identify genetic traits that can help produce the next super spud.
“Our super pangenome sheds light on the potato’s genetic diversity and what kinds of genetic traits could potentially be bred into our modern-day crop to make it better,” says Professor Strömvik, who collaborated with researchers across Canada, the Unites States and Peru. “It represents 60 species and is the most extensive collection of genome sequence data for the potato and its relatives to date,” she adds.
A genome is an organism’s complete set of genetic instructions known as the DNA sequence, while a pangenome aims to capture the complete genetic diversity within a species, and a super pangenome also includes multiple species.
Read more at: McGill University
Photo Credit: Pexels via Pixabay
