The Wisconsin Gardener

cc I am with Dr John Bamberg head of the U.S. Potato Gene Bank, north of Sturgeon Bay. I guess, one of the first things that is a surprise to many people this is the world's largest potato gene bank. You work part for the University of Wisconsin and part for the USDA. Correct. This has to be my first question. What does a potato gene bank do? In a nutshell, basically, we provide the raw materials for improving the potato crop. You're saving the genetic material of potatoes from all over the world. Right. We're going to talk about what you do with those materials to improve the potato crop. That needs to start with a botany lesson. Yes, so you see here a wild potato species. It's typical of the kind of things that we keep. This is not cultivated, it's wild. This is a wild one, okay. If you're going to do sexual reproduction which is mainly what we do. You have a flower, and the male parts there that if you want to reproduce this and make it into seeds. You need to collect pollen. You buzz that into a little capsule and then you reapply that to the stigma, and in 4-6 weeks... You "buzz" it? You buzz it with a little buzzer an artificial bumblebee. It happens in nature with a bumblebee. This would be done in a greenhouse or a lab. Exactly. After you've pollinated them what a lot of people are surprised about is you don't get seed right away. You get these really cool berries or fruit. It's very much like a tomato except that these are smaller and green. And not edible. Right, this isn't the edible part. Each bag represents a different population. You see hundreds of fruit in there. Each fruit will have hundreds of botanical seeds. What surprises me I've seen the fruit on a potato before but you've got so many varieties in here. I mean, compare this one to like this one. I had no idea there were so many choices. They're completely different. Most of them are small and green like that but some are elongated, some are actually pointed. These are speckled. They look like a little pepper. Of course, they're closely related to peppers. Make sure I put them back in the right bag. You don't want to mix up the populations. Now from the berries I assume I'm going over here to seeds, right? Right, every packet like this every little towel you see came from one of these bags. We have this process of washing with water grinding up the fruit, and then sorting the seeds sifting the seeds out and drying like this. You see there are hundreds of thousands of seeds there. Very light, long lived, so we can store them in the cooler. You store them in the cooler in packets like these? Right. That's also the form in which we would distribute to cooperators, researchers and breeders. A sample of maybe 50 seeds is typical. We've been doing this for like 60 years. I suppose to keep breeding and coming up with new stuff it's an ongoing project for a long time. What do they look like if I was to grow them out by seed? Okay, so our cooperators or if we need to grow them ourselves we'll sow them in a small pot like this. This is probably about 50 seeds, actually. Wow, okay. So here, you can see, just like tomatoes that you would grow in your garden. You're getting a little plant there that you can transplant. These seeds stay viable in a cooler for a long time and you can pull them out any time you want to do that. We're very lucky that they're the kind of seeds that can maybe keep cold their germination for 50-60 years. Oh, wow. I have to ask though, now what's this? That's the other form, exactly. It looks like a little seedling. Most potatoes, you can reproduce by seed but then you're going to scramble the genetics. It won't keep that original genotype. A cutting like that is all sterile inside there. You don't have to worry about diseases once you start with a clean plant. Then they can be propagated in there and they can be sent in test tubes like that. So this is a clone. Exactly. You can mail this anywhere to other researchers. That might actually be a named variety that you would recognize because we don't just work with wild, exotic things. We also have, you know, edible named-- Regular edible potatoes. Like European or Latin American varieties, for example. You've got varieties over here I don't recognize. What are these and why do you have them? This is a recognizable form of potato, right? Yeah, it has a tuber. The is the part you eat, but it doesn't look very edible because it's got these deep eyes. This is actually a cultivated form from the Andes in Latin America. Why do you have it? Besides the fact that it's kind of pretty. This particular one, we found has tremendous antioxidants. Really? Yeah, we were with a cooperator in Washington state who is actually looking for extremely antioxidants. We said we can grow a bunch out and test them. In fact, like triple of kale. Tremendous levels of antioxidants. Potatoes have just moved up the value scale for people trying to eat healthy. Right. But like everything else in breeding you have to get that trait into the kind that you want to put on your table to eat. Right, something you really want to bake. You have a long way to go on this one, John. These do not look like anything I want to eat. Those are the little ones that we find in the wild. In fact, we collected those from Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico. Okay, why? Well, at the time, you didn't know. Right, we do it just for exploring but we have cooperators in Texas A&M University. We found that extracts from those, we don't know why but extracts from those have a very strong anti-prostate cancer effect. Awesome. Why are you keeping this one? What's special about this one? That's a good example. We're interested in things that help you to grow the crop better disease, pest resistance, or that kind of thing. We're also interested in nutritional traits like we already talked about a little bit. This one is called Solanum boliviense. Comes from Bolivia and nearby countries. This one, just within the last year or so we recognized as having tremendous levels of folate So, it's amazing. With wild potatoes, you think well, if I could increase 20% that would be great but these are four- or five-fold of what you get. The potential is really there for breeding that into a crop. It would be valuable around the world. High folate. Look at this one, it's a little different. It's pretty, again. We've been looking at white flowers. Many of them have purple flowers, as well and different leaf forms. This one is Solanum ocadae. Tomatoes have this alkaloid tomatine that's been found to be a healthy thing to eat. Once the tomato turns red, the tomatine goes away. I'm not eating the green tomatoes! Well, you've got to eat green tomatoes or tomatillos, or something like that. But these have, in their tubers mind you that tomato alkaloid and that's an anti-cancer. Another anti-cancer? We need to end this by saying eat your potatoes. Exactly. Thanks, John.