Genome design of hybrid potato

Reinventing potato from a clonally propagated tetraploid into a seed-propagated diploid, hybrid potato, is an important innovation in agriculture. Due to deleterious mutations, it has remained a challenge to develop highly homozygous inbred lines, a prerequisite to breed hybrid potato. Here, we employed genome design to develop a generation of pure and fertile potato lines and thereby the uniform, vigorous F1s. The metrics we applied in genome design included the percentage of genome homozygosity and the number of deleterious mutations in the starting material, the number of segregation distortions in the S1 population, the haplotype information to infer the break of tight linkage between beneficial and deleterious alleles, and the genome complementarity of the parental lines. This study transforms potato breeding from a slow, non-accumulative mode into a fast-iterative one, thereby potentiating a broad spectrum of benefits to farmers and consumers.