b"Looking Towards aDiploid Potato FutureThe potato breeding world is taking in the whole picture when it comes to diploids.Ashley RobinsonTHE WORDS DIPLOIDSand true potato seeds has been popping up a lot in the potato research and breeding worlds. And while it may seem like something far off in the future, its coming, and it has the potato breeding industry looking closer at just how that future may look.Essentially, we need to work together. And there's a lot of room to work in precompetitive space. We're going to end with a sort of call to action that says, okay, let's try to band together as a potato community and solve some of these big problems that are too big for any one group, Josh Parsons, research develop-ment associate and principal scientist with FritoLay, explained at the virtual Potato Association of America annual meeting.Diploids are meant to make potato breeding more efficient as there are fewer copies of chromosomes in them for crossing, making for more predictable breeding outcomes. In a diploid variety there are two copies of chromosomes, while traditional tetraploid potato varieties have four copies of each chromosome. Genes in potato are typically very heterozygous, mean-ing that you can get multiple combinations of genes within each set of chromosomes. If you cross two heterozygous plants, you can get a fair amount of variation within the family, Dennis Halterman, research geneticist with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service, says.However, most diploid potatoes are incompatible. Meaning they wont produce true potato seed when pollen from an individ-ual plant is placed on flowers of the same plant, Halterman says. The trick now is to introduce these self-compatibility genes into the parents that we want to use for diploid potato breeding. Self-compatibility is important because remember that we want to make the plants as homozygous as possible, he explains.Once self-compatibility genes are introduced, and the variety become highly homozygous inbred lines, they become parents. In this breeding scheme, two inbred lines are crossed to gener-ate true potato seed of a new variety.In order to rapidly increase the number of individuals thatA true potato seedball cut open to show the true potato seeds we use to plant a crop, we rely on starting from seed derivedinside of it, with true potato seeds lying next to a Canadian dime to from plants grown in greenhouses where disease pressure isshow size profile.PHOTO: HELEN TAI80/ SEEDWORLD.COMDECEMBER 2021"