ABSTRACT
Potato has great genetic diversity that has been lost during the process of domestication. Due to this constraint, modern breeding programs rely on limited genetic resources for the improvement of potato. Allele mining helps in the identification of target alleles, and novel genes of known functions along with their sequence within the diverse germplasm collections controlling key traits. The wild potato relatives and landraces found at the diversity center serve as excellent germplasm for exploring the allelic variation and candidate genes to develop allele-specific markers to screen against particular traits. Moreover, the availability of genome sequence in potato, especially for wild relatives, such as S. commersonii, provide insights into genome evolution and mining of significant genes/alleles associated with various traits of economic value. The current chapter highlights important genomic regions (genes/alleles) originated from wild potato germplasm conferring tolerance/resistance against abiotic, biotic and tuber-related characteristics. The understanding of natural allelic variation will prove to be worthy in marker-assisted selection and identification of new haplotypes.
