ABSTRACT
The cultivated potato (Solanum tuberosum ssp. tuberosum L.) is a tuberforming crop plant that ranks as the world’s fourth most important food crop after maize, wheat and rice. Potato, together with other tuberous crop plants, plays an important role in developing countries, because their carbohydrate yield per unit of land is higher than in other major crops across a wide range of ecological zones. Potato belongs to the genus Solanum with at least 1,000 other species, including tomato and eggplant. As a crop plant, potato is vegetatively multiplied through tubers, because the botanical seeds (true potato seeds, TPS) cannot be routinely used by commercial seed potato industry. The tubers grown from TPS are less uniform, and for production of high-quality tubers, the commercial multiplication must be done through seed tubers, which are genetically true to type. However, vegetatively propagated plant materials are vulnerable to plant diseases, such as ring rot, blackleg, viruses and other pathogens. Therefore, the initiative materials for cloning need to be completely disease-free, confi rmed by appropriate analyses, and thereby providing suitable materials for certifi ed seed potato production (Dean 1994).
