Super potatoes: when heat, drought and floods strike at the same time

Food producers today face an increasingly rapid succession of extreme weather events that threaten crops almost every year. Researchers from the Department of Biotechnology and Systems Biology at the National Institute of Biology have, as part of the international ADAPT project, developed approaches for creating so-called ‘super potatoes’. Using modern methods of data integration across multiple biological levels, they analysed the molecular responses of the well-known ‘Desiree’ potato variety to stress factors such as heat, drought and flooding, and identified the variables associated with its tolerance to extreme weather events. This approach has revealed how these responses are interlinked when the potato is exposed to a combination of stress factors simultaneously, rather than just each one individually. This picture of the molecular basis of tolerance forms the foundation for targeted breeding of varieties that will withstand real-world, often concurrent, climatic stresses.