ABSTRACT
Potato is the third most important food crop in the world with high nutritive value for feeding the growing world population and economic value for the growers. Conventional potato breeding for trait improvement is a slow and tedious process with added complications due to its complex genetic makeup including varying ploidy levels, heterozygosity, intra-species crossing incompatibilities and inbreeding depression. Genomic selection (GS) is becoming increasingly applicable in potato as high-throughput genotyping and computational methods advance; and the costs continue to decrease. With the availability of genome-wide molecular markers and predictions entirely based on training populations in the absence of direct phenotyping, crop improvement programs using GS in potato will result in more gains per unit time. Thus, GS promises a better approach for precise and reliable prediction and shortening the long and tedious breeding cycle. This chapter overall addresses the road to genomic selection in potato and its usefulness in potato breeding programs.
