The potato possesses more related wild and cultivated species than any
other crop plant. Taxonomists recognise 235 wild and eight cultivated
potato species with thousands of farmer varieties. These potato genet
ic resources are considered to be under risk of genetic erosion in the
primary and secondary centres of diversity. Recognising this threat,
several potato research institutions have sponsored numerous potato co
llecting expeditions to Latin America. However, despite these efforts,
many wild potato species clue still only known as herbarium specimens
. On the other hand, the exploration of new areas or a move intensive
search within some known areas has resulted in the discovery of more t
han 50 new potato species in the last 30 years. The potato genetic res
ources are safely stored in several potato genebanks world wide. Seven
of the major potato genebanks conserve a total of 13,137 wild potato
accessions and about 3,500 farmer varieties from Latin America. Howeve
r, the degree of representativeness of the wild potato species conserv
ed ex situ is far from being complete. Only few species are adequately
sampled throughout their geographic area of distribution. The major p
otato genebanks have accumulated data on 36,590 evaluations of wild po
tato accessions and move than 46,000 evaluations of Andean farmer vari
eties to the most important diseases, pests and other desirable traits
. Despite that the potato genetic resources have an enormous breeding
potential to solve present and future constraints to increasing potato
productivity, they are still under-utilised because only a small port
ion of the total variability present in the tuber-bearing Solanum spec
ies has been used in potato improvement. Passport and evaluation data
on potato holdings in the major genebanks are available in an Inter-ge
nebank Potato Database managed by a user-friendly menu driven computer
ised database system and it will be made available through the Interne
t.