A Statistical Evaluation of Hybrid Potato Breeding

Potato is one of humanity's most important food crops. Despite this, it has had less genetic improvement over the past century relative to other field crops. Some of the known hindrances which stunt potato improvement include its polyploidy, semi-obligate clonal propagation, and as a direct result, its longer breeding cycles.

Hybrid potato breeding has been proposed as one strategy to mitigate some of these barriers. Benefits include the use of true potato seed (TPS) which gives faster multiplication rates, makes multi-environment yield trials possible, and provides high-quality trial data which can fuel future quantitative discovery. However, adapting potato to a hybrid schema carries with it many hazards and areas that are still poorly understood. This includes such topics as the degree of heterotic vigour, understanding the genetic architecture of yield, and the potential of modern predictive models for hybrid potato.

This thesis conducts a quantitative dissection of a hybrid potato breeding programme to evaluate its yield potential using modern statistical genetic methods.

James Adams

candidate of the PhD defence:"A Statistical Evaluation of Hybrid Potato Breeding"