Hybrid potato breeding through True Potato Seeds (TPS)

Solynta's breeding technology cuts new potato variety introduction from 12 to 3 years. True Potato Seeds can be used as starting material.

Solynta’s patented F1 Hybrid potato breeding technique makes it possible to grow potatoes from true-seed and allows targeted breeding. Valuable traits can now be utilized, like disease resistance, nutritional value, higher yields, as well as processing traits for fries, chips, starch and bio-based processors.

This technique is based on the development of pure homozygous parent lines that are crossed to obtain F1 hybrid cultivars. These parent lines can be enriched with new traits by crossing and selection. The F1 hybrid cultivars can be developed in three years. This is much faster than traditional breeding, that often takes more than ten years to develop and launch a cultivar and produce sufficient amounts of potato seeds.

This breeding method is a generative method as it is based on continuous generations of selfings and crossings. The F1 hybrid cultivars are maintained, produced and propagated by seed. This allows a fast production of seed in one generation, while the traditional cultivars are propagated by tubers, which requires many years of vegetative production. When using True Potato Seeds (TPS) as starting material, 30 grams of TPS compares to 2500 kilograms of Seed Tubers.