Scientists hunt down potato origins - to Chile

[Judi Lynn]

Scientists hunt down potato origins - to Chile

5 February 2008 -- More than 99 percent of all modern potato varieties planted today are the direct descendents of varieties that once grew in the lowlands of south-central Chile.

How Chilean germplasm came to dominate the modern potato-which spread worldwide from Europe-has been the subject of a long, contentious debate among scientists.

While some plant scientists have maintained that Chilean potatoes were the first to be planted in Europe, a more widely accepted story holds that European potatoes were originally descended from plants grown high in the Andes mountains between eastern Venezuela and northern Argentina. According to this theory, Andean potatoes were wiped out during the Great Irish Potato Famine, the 19th-century late-blight epidemic that devastated potato fields across Europe, initiating the import of Chilean varieties to re-establish the crop.

In a report published today in the American Journal of Botany, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers Mercedes Ames and David Spooner say both theories are wrong. By analyzing the DNA of historical potato specimens, the researchers found that both Chilean and Andean potatoes were grown in Europe decades before and decades after the famine, the first direct evidence that the potatoes were grown simultaneously in Europe.

More:
http://www.farmnews.co.nz/news/2008/jan/919.shtml

http://img.epinions.com.nyud.net:8090/images/opti/7f/e4/Mr_Potato_Head_Trick_or_Tater-resized200.jpg http://www.emaginatorium.com.nyud.net:8090/101web/behold/potato.jpg