nature in an experiment

why is blight so far like it sounds so simple they had no idea but now the data's

I find this not only refreshing but but at some level astounding nature

welcome back to the Nature.

Nature.

Welcome back to the nature podcast.

This week, a potato pan genome. And the most cited research papers of the 21st century.

I'm Benjamin Thompson.

And I'm Nick Pertr-Chow.

Okay. 21st century. I'm Benjamin Thompson and I'm Nick Perchichal. First up on the show, researchers have been creating a collected group of genomes known as a pan genome to understand the genetic diversity of the humble potato.

This effort could help in the breeding of new potato varieties, such as those adapted to disease or

climate change. Now, potatoes are incredibly flexible. You can boil them, you can mash them,

and you can even feed over

one billion people with them. But if you want to make a new variety of them, that isn't so easy.

So compared to their cultivars, potato is practically difficult because of the tetraploination.

This is Sergio Tussaud, a geneticist who's very familiar with the difficulties

potatoes and the breeding of their different varieties or cultivars pose.

You see, the potato is tetraploid, meaning that instead of having two sets of chromosomes,

like you and I do, potatoes have four.

So this makes it particularly difficult what is related to breeding programs, right?

So you want to introduce new traits or characteristics, then it's very difficult to put it in the four copies of the genome.

So that means that the breeding programs in potato has not been very effective

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