Provided by Will Dunham
Washington (Reuters) -Bulv is one of the world’s food tufts, first grown thousands of years ago in the South American Andes region, before spreading the world since the 16th century. Despite the importance of humanity, the evolutionary origin of potatoes has remained so far – so far.
A new analysis of 450 genomes from grown potatoes and 56 wild potato species of genomes revealed that the potato line was due to the natural interaction between wild tomato plants and potato species in South America about 9 million years ago.
This hybridization event has led to the emergence of potato plant tubers – an enlarged structure containing underground nutrients underground, according to researchers, who have also identified two most important genes related to tuber formation. Meanwhile, the part of the tomato plant is the fruit, the potato plant is a tuber.
“Potatoes are actually one of the most amazing tufts of humanity, combining extraordinary versatility, nutritional value and cultural everywhere, as soon as few crops can coincide,” said Sanwen Huang, a genome of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, published in the magazine chamber and plant plant breeder.
“People eat potatoes using almost every cooking method-baking, roasting, kitchens, steamed and baking. Despite their stereotypical as carbohydrates, potatoes offer vitamin C, potassium, fiber and resistance starch and are naturally free, low fat and saturated-meal.
Resistant starch is a type of carbohydrate that opposes digestion in the small intestine and fermentation in the colon, nourishing positive bacteria in the intestine.
The scientific name of the modern potato factory is Solanum tuberosum. Her two of her parents, identified in the study, were plants that were now found in potato ancestors named Etuberosum, which are very reminiscent of a potato plant but lacks tuber and tomato plant.
These two plants themselves had a common ancestor who lived about 14 million years ago and was able to mix naturally when the failed hybridization event took place five million years after they were divorced.
“This event has led to the rearrangement of genes so that the new line produces tubers that allow these plants to expand into a newly created cold, dry habitat in the Andes Mountain chain,” said Sandra Knapp, co-author of the London Museum of Natural History.
This hybridization event coincided with the rapid rise of the Andes. The potato factory could adapt to the changing regional environment and flourish in harsh mountain conditions.
“Tubers can accumulate nutrients for adaptation cold, and enable an equivalent reproduction to meet the challenge of decreased fertility under cold conditions. This allowed the plant to survive and expand quickly,” Huang said.
The findings of the study, according to researchers, can help improve the cultivated potato breeding to solve the environmental challenges that crops currently face due to climate changes.
There are currently around 5,000 varieties of potatoes. According to the Peruvian International Potato Center Research Organization, potatoes are the third most important food crop in the world after rice and wheat. China is the leading potato producer in the world.
“It is always difficult to remove all harmful mutations of breeding potato genomes. This investigation opens a new door to make the potato without harmful mutations using tomato as a chassis of a synthetic biology,” Huang said.
The study can also open the door to create a new plant species that can cause tomato fruits above the ground and potato tuber underground, says Zhiyang Zhang, a podctorate of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
Potatoes and tomatoes are members of the family flowering plants of the Night of the Nightshade, where, among other things, tobacco and peppers. The study did not investigate other tuber root plants originating from South America, such as sweet potatoes and YUCA, which are members of different flowering plant families.
Although the parts of tomatoes and potato plants that humans eat are quite different, the plants themselves are very similar.
“We use different parts of these two types, fruit in tomatoes and tubers in potatoes,” Knapp said. “If you look at flowers or leaves, they are very similar. And if you are lucky to let your potato plant make fruit, they look like small green tomatoes. But don’t eat them. They are not very nice.”
(Will Dunham’s message, edited by Rosalba O’Brien)