Evaluation of a representative sample from cuban potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) germplasm for tuber quality

Abstract

Developing new potato varieties with a highertuber quality is at present, the most important challenge to thecuban breeding program. On this sense, it is necessary to makean exhaustive evaluation to the main characters that can beaffect this relevant attribute. So, the objective of this work wasfocusing to carry out an evaluation to a several potato varieties,representative from the cuban potato germplasm, for tuberquality properties to be used as parents in the potato breedingprogram. Seventy potato cultivated accessions from the cubangermplasm bank were used. Several quality tuber characterswere evaluated: specific gravity, dry matter, reduced sugar,starch, tuber average weight, equatorial and long tuber diameterand sensorial evaluation. Media, standard deviation, minimumand maximum values and coefficient of variation were estimated.A Principal Components Analyses, by means a biplotrepresentation, to known accessions clusters and selects itaccording its behaviour for tuber quality was used. A goodbehaviour for tuber quality were found in the collection(22,9 %). Values of dry matter content and starch content werehigher to 19 and 12 %, respectively and sugar reducer contentwas very low (> 0,5 %). All the varieties could be used asparent in a breeding program to obtain new varieties forindustrial processing or directly on the different productionsystems. Atlantic, Bellini, Cal White, Derby, Maranca, Romano,Santana and Slaney and the new cubans clons; 1-10-96, 2-31-95,4-6-93 and 9-32-93 were the most remarkable genotypes.