A breakthrough by plant scientists could be set to boost food security and develop new export opportunities for potato farmers in Scotland.

Amid growing concern at soaring food prices and the impact of climate change on crop yields, experts at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) have developed a way to accelerate breeding potatoes that are resistant to disease.

Potatoes are typically propagated by cloning, but the Holy Grail for potato cultivation has been the creation of a cultivar that can be generated by seed.

True seed potatoes – also known as diploid potatoes – will need fewer pesticides and be more adaptive to the world’s changing needs. While diploids already exist, they are not yet commercially viable as they do not produce high enough yields to be worth cultivating.

Scientists, including Dr Tiina Sarkinen, a tropical biodiversity scientist specialising in the Solanaceae family at RBGE, had been keen to address the issue.

She said: “Speeding up true potato seed breeding is a key priority. Having a better true potato seed available would reduce diseases that plague the potato industry simply because most pathogens are not seed borne.

“Currently, breeding a disease resistant potato takes at least fifty years to develop and that would be considered fast. Now, it can be done much faster.

“At the moment, the seed potato industry is big in Scotland, so we are a safe place to produce quality-controlled, high-yield seed potatoes and if there is a true diploid, then Scotland could potentially start exporting both the traditional tuber seeds and diploid potatoes.

READ MORE: Autumn is go for Scottish seed potatoes to Northern Ireland

“Diploids are going to be globally more in demand because in the tropics, it is predicted they are going to be key to success of potato cultivation.”

Dr Sarkinen explained: “Right now we plant the potato from a tuber every year. We put it in the ground and it grows. We save one of those tubers to plant a new one, but the trouble is that pests and pathogens are carried over in that tuber.

“The problem is in places, like the tropics, where the climate is much more moist and warm, it is really important to have clean tubers for planting, but these are often the countries with the least access to clean tubers. So having seed instead of tubers, cuts the cycle.”

Dr Sarkinen was part of an international research team that used wild species related to the potato to identify the barriers to making a better true potato seed. “We used full genomes of 92 plant species in the nightshade (Solanaceae) family and identified almost 368,000 harmful gene mutations that had accumulated over time.

“Thanks to our map, these harmful mutations can now be avoided and this is a real game-changer in diploid potato breeding programmes.”

Potatoes are often susceptible to pests and diseases that cause poor growth, defoliation or even the death of plants in huge numbers, and this is particularly true in countries like China and Bangladesh which have seen a huge growth in potato farming.

While traditional propagation methods are likely to remain more productive for the time being because of the cooler climate in Britain compared to the tropics, the research offers opportunities for the development and export of true potato seed, especially to tropical countries that suffer from greater losses due to pathogens for farmers in Scotland.

The methodology, called Genomic Evolutionary Rate Profiling (GERP) enables researchers to identify and quantify harmful mutations more effectively than previous approaches, increasing their ability to predict a hybrid’s success by 24.7%.

While it won’t affect the potato on the plate, it will help to improve food security across the world. In time, the method could also be used to improve productivity in other crops in the Solanaceae family, including tomatoes, peppers and aubergines.