COLLECTION, MAINTENANCE AND EVALUATION OF POTATO GENETIC-RESOURCES

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.