Potato

The BOLD potato project aims to increase the potato diversity available to potato breeding programs and farmers by integrating lines derived from crop wild relatives (CWR) into breeding pipelines and developing new elite varieties with introgressions from CWR.

Potato faces a number of challenges, including the effects of climate change and a range of pests and diseases, particularly late blight and bacterial wilt. Previous work has identified sources of heat and drought tolerance and disease resistance in CWR. However, these are often weedy plants producing small, bitter tubers. Pre-breeding is needed to transfer these traits into the cultivated potato. A further challenge is that the crop is largely produced clonally rather than from true seed, which presents challenges for producing sufficient disease-free planting materials to promote large-scale uptake of new varieties. 

The Crop Wild Relatives Project made considerable strides in pre-breeding potatoes using CWR, culminating in the release of CIP-Matilde (2021) CIP-Asiryq (2025), new potato varieties derived from CWR that are almost completely resistant to late blight — a disease that caused an estimated global loss of $6.7 billion in yield losses and control costs and that is spreading into higher altitudes in the Andes. In Kenya, the project is introducing genetic traits from wild potato relatives originating in the Andes to develop climate-resilient and disease-resistant potato varieties for East African farmers.

Pre-bred lines developed from crosses with wild relatives have also shown good resistance to late blight and bacterial wilt and tolerance of heat, drought and salinity. The project also saw the development of testing of a new breeding approach — diploid hybridization — that facilitates pre-breeding and variety development between potato wild relatives and cultivated varieties.

• Introduce genetic traits from wild potato relatives originating in the Andes to fight late blight, a destructive plant disease, in the tropical highlands of East Africa. 
• Breed potatoes resistance to late blight and virus better adapted to the tropical highlands 
• Use participatory field trials where local growers evaluate and advance the promising materials aligned with the local and  regional market demand
• Strengthen the potato breeding network for Africa with targeted genetic variability to respond faster to the involving markets and climate uncertainty
• Increase the local capacity on advanced breeding methods and tools - such as developing improved potato varieties through hybrid seed technology.
• Engaging local seed enterprises, particularly youth groups, connecting breeding to seed systems, increases the chances of adoption but also creates a feedback loop to the breeding process.
• A joint hybrid potato breeding program with a private-sector partner, leveraging diverse genetic resources and complementary expertise to accelerate genetic gain and increase the value to the  money investment.