Abstract
Drought stress is a significant constraint that affects the yield of almost all major crops. Its impact is expected to worsen due to global climate change and human population expansion. Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is the third most important food crop worldwide, but it is highly susceptible to drought stress. In order to understand the effects of drought stress on yield and identify traits for selecting drought-tolerant potato genotypes, we evaluated the response of a range of agronomic and physiological traits in 15 potato genotypes under well-watered (WW) and water deficit (WD) conditions. The harvest index (HI) was found to have a high plot-based heritability (0.98), indicating that it can be used for the indirect selection of drought-tolerant genotypes. In contrast, SPAD was sensitive to detecting early drought stress in potatoes. Drought-tolerant genotypes, including CIP392797.22 (UNICA), CIP397077.16, CIP398190.89, CIP398208.219, and CIP398208.620, were able to allocate limited water towards tuber production rather than biomass. These genotypes showed high tuber production under WW conditions and increased photosynthetic activity and water use efficiency under WD conditions.
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Data availability
The dataset, code, and reproducible data analysis are presented in Supplementary File 1.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the financial support by BMZ/GIZ through a research grant for “Improved potato varieties and water management technologies to enhance water use efficiency, resilience, cost-effectiveness, and productivity of smallholder farms in stress-prone Central Asian environments”. We also thank Jorge Vega and David Saravia for their support during the installation and evaluation of the experiments.
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Conception and design of the study by KA, RG. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by FLI, ERFV, RG, RB. The first draft of the manuscript was written by FLI and ERFV and the authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Lozano-Isla, F., Farfan-Vignolo, E.R., Gutierrez, R. et al. Harvest index is a key trait for screening drought-tolerant potato genotypes (Solanum tuberosum). J. Crop Sci. Biotechnol. 27, 91–103 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12892-023-00215-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12892-023-00215-2