Qin Chen
College of Agronomy, Northwest A&F University

The potato is the fourth most important vegetable and food crop worldwide after wheat, rice and maize. Potato tuber is also a good source of antioxidants. Enhancing antioxidant capacity in potato is a good strategy for increasing the consumption of antioxidants to protect human health. To date, China has become the biggest potato producer in the world. Potatoes are planted in 27 Chinese provinces and autonomous regions, and most of the provinces have regions that are dry or half-dry lands. Since potatoes are more droughts tolerant, there is a greater economic benefit from planting potatoes compared to other grain crops. Therefore, it is likely that potato planting will increase in future years in these dry land regions of China. Because of its importance in the human diet, potato growth and development have received considerable scientific attention. The trend of potato production in China has been toward greater acreage in warm areas using cultivars that were developed for production in the dry or half-dry land regions. It was noted that high salinity, water deficit, extreme temperatures, disease and insect stresses are the major causal factors that limit agricultural production of potato world wide. Development of new eco-potatoes with improved tolerance to drought, disease and increase nutritional contents are very important for efficient and sustainable agricultural production. Hence, the study of abiotic stress and nutritional quality on the potato crop has assumed substantial importance. Numerous methods should be tested for the successful production of stress tolerant and high nutritional potato including the use of both classical and molecular genetic plant breeding techniques. Researches have demonstrated that potato plants respond to biotic and abiotic stresses with an array of stress-response genes. Therefore, the use of a multi-gene approach incorporating the simultaneous transfer of several genes offers substantial promise because of the possible inheritance of all the stress genes of a particular locus. In this presentation, we used potato protoplast fusion as a model to show how we can develop new potatoes with multiple resistances to insects and diseases and drought tolerance at the same time increase nutritional quality. It has been documented that there are many genes in wild potato species that are activated in response to drought, disease resistance and high antioxidant contents. The germplasm bases for potato are large and assessments of germplasm performance under challenging condition have revealed new possibilities. The knowledge gained from this study holds great promise for potato germplasm enhancement for sustainable crop production in the dry land farming of tomorrow. Taken together with the increased knowledge of molecular biology of the potato and of genes responsible for the drought, disease and high antioxidants, the potato research is promising for our ability to meet the challenge of improving potato end use quality and yield in non-traditional and stress-prone environments for sustainable crop production.