Defending potatoes
About 22% of the potatoes grown in the U.S. are made into chips. And Americans eat more chips—an average of 4 pounds per person per year—than any other country, reports the USDA's Agricultural Research Service.
About 22% of the potatoes grown in the U.S. are made into chips. And Americans eat more chips—an average of 4 pounds per person per year—than any other country, reports the USDA's Agricultural Research Service.
Agriculture
Aug 9, 2024
0
0
Scientists have made a significant breakthrough in agricultural biotechnology by using CRISPR/Cas9 to edit the potato genome, resulting in plants with increased resistance to both biotic and abiotic stresses. This innovation ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 8, 2024
0
33
Sweet potato, a staple in combating global hunger, faces significant threats from pests like whiteflies and weevils, impacting plant growth and yields. A new study harnesses the power of genomic and metagenomic data to predict ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 8, 2024
0
0
In an examination of the genetic material found in historic potato leaves, North Carolina State University researchers reveal more about the tit-for-tat evolutionary changes occurring in both potato plants and the pathogen ...
Cell & Microbiology
Aug 5, 2024
0
54
A new study shows that a native potato species was brought to southern Utah by Indigenous people in the distant past, making it a candidate for the only culturally significant plant species to have been domesticated in the ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Jul 18, 2024
0
13
A new study challenges the common theory that the devastating potato blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans originated in Mexico. Researchers meticulously reconstructed its global migration history and found it likely originated ...
Agriculture
Jul 1, 2024
0
0
Fruits of Solanum plants, a group in the nightshade family, are incredibly diverse, ranging from sizable red tomatoes and purple eggplants to the poisonous green berries on potato plants. A new and improved family tree of ...
Evolution
Jun 21, 2024
0
97
Scientists have discovered that calcium plays a significant role in enhancing the resistance of potato plants to bacterial wilt. This disease causes worldwide losses of potatoes costing $19 billion per year. The findings ...
Cell & Microbiology
May 1, 2024
0
2
A team of researchers led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst has drawn inspiration from a wide variety of natural geometric motifs—including those of 12-sided dice and potato chips—in order to extend a set of ...
Nanomaterials
Apr 30, 2024
0
62
Sweet potatoes are a popular food choice for consumers worldwide because of their delicious taste and nutritious quality. The red, tuberous root vegetable can be processed into chips and fries, and it has a range of industrial ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Apr 24, 2024
0
1
The potato is a starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial Solanum tuberosum of the Solanaceae family (also known as the nightshades). The word potato may refer to the plant itself as well as the edible tuber. In the region of the Andes, there are some other closely related cultivated potato species. Potatoes were first introduced outside the Andes region four centuries ago, and have become an integral part of much of the world's cuisine. It is the world's fourth-largest food crop, following rice, wheat, and maize. Long-term storage of potatoes requires specialised care in cold warehouses.
Wild potato species occur throughout the Americas, from the United States to Uruguay. The potato was originally believed to have been domesticated independently in multiple locations, but later genetic testing of the wide variety of cultivars and wild species proved a single origin for potatoes in the area of present-day southern Peru (from a species in the Solanum brevicaule complex), where they were domesticated 7,000–10,000 years ago. Following centuries of selective breeding, there are now over a thousand different types of potatoes. Of these subspecies, a variety that at one point grew in the Chiloé Archipelago (the potato's south-central Chilean sub-center of origin) left its germplasm on over 99% of the cultivated potatoes worldwide.
Following the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, the Spanish introduced the potato to Europe in the second half of the 16th century. The staple was subsequently conveyed by European mariners to territories and ports throughout the world. The potato was slow to be adopted by distrustful European farmers, but soon enough it became an important food staple and field crop that played a major role in the European 19th century population boom. However, lack of genetic diversity, due to the very limited number of varieties initially introduced, left the crop vulnerable to disease. In 1845, a plant disease known as late blight, caused by the fungus-like oomycete Phytophthora infestans, spread rapidly through the poorer communities of western Ireland, resulting in the crop failures that led to the Great Irish Famine. Nonetheless, thousands of varieties persist in the Andes, where over 100 cultivars might be found in a single valley, and a dozen or more might be maintained by a single agricultural household.
The annual diet of an average global citizen in the first decade of the 21st century included about 33 kg (73 lb) of potato. However, the local importance of potato is extremely variable and rapidly changing. It remains an essential crop in Europe (especially eastern and central Europe), where per capita production is still the highest in the world, but the most rapid expansion over the past few decades has occurred in southern and eastern Asia. China is now the world's largest potato-producing country, and nearly a third of the world's potatoes are harvested in China and India.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA