Modernizing Potato Germplasm Enhancement Breeding in the Pacific Northwest – Max Feldman, USDA-ARS

Potato breeding in the Pacific Northwest has traditionally relied almost exclusively on brute force phenotypic selection to narrow the pool of candidates from tens of thousands of progeny to a handful of tetraploid clone releases over a 10 – 15 year period. Although this strategy has yielded fantastic new cultivars that exhibit superior yield, improved storage quality, and novel disease resistance packages; the overall rate of genetic gain over time will remain low unless the genomic selection schema used in many other cropping systems can be applied in potato. Our USDA-ARS germplasm enhancement program in Prosser, WA aims to accelerate the discovery and introgression of disease resistance and added value traits using a combination of marker assisted selection and quantitative genetics approaches. Our team’s recent efforts focused on trait discovery, genetic mapping, and germplasm improvement leveraging high-throughput phenotyping will be discussed.