ECPGR Potato Working Group

March 2024
The kick-off meeting of the EURO-POTATOES Activity was held in Młochów and Radzikow, Poland from 19-20 March 2024. The meeting also played a role in revitalizing the efforts of the Potato Working Group. For more information, visit the EURO-POTATOES page.

February 2023
The EURO-POTATOES Activity, submitted for funding under the Sixth Call of the Phase X ECPGR Activity Grant Scheme, was selected by the Executive Committee and approved in February 2023. 

September 2018
European project ECOBREED: Increasing the efficiency and competitiveness of organic crop breeding
ECOBREED will improve the availability of seed and varieties suitable for organic and low-input production. Activities will focus on four crop species, selected for their potential contribution to increase competitiveness of the organic sector: buckwheat, wheat, potato and soybean.
The project will develop (a) methods, strategies and infrastructures for organic breeding, (b) varieties with improved stress resistance, resource use efficiency and quality and (c) improved methods for the production of high quality organic seed. [more]

February 2018
European Cultivated Potato Database (ECPD)
The newly refreshed site of the ECPD is now live. The site retains many of the features that users of the previous site will be familiar with, including all the botanical and disease data provided by institutes throughout Europe.
As part of the refresh the database managers at Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture (SASA) have taken the opportunity to integrate the data from the “botanical” database used within SASA for the purposes of Distinctness, Uniformity and Stability (DUS) testing in potato and based on UPOV Guidelines and CPVO Protocols.  Users will therefore see two character sets within the new database as well as a different range of material, with the ECPD element continuing to focus on genetic resource varieties whilst the “botanical” element covers varieties passing through DUS.

October 2014
The AEGIS Competitive Grant project ‘Identification of old potato clones having unreliable variety names by means of fingerprinting using microsatellite (SSR) markers to assist in setting up the AEGIS collection for potato cultivars’ has been finalized and its report placed on the AEGIS Grant Scheme webpage.

The aim of the project was to use microsatellite genotyping to assist in setting up the AEGIS collection for potato cultivars by means of fingerprinting old potato clones with questionable identity, to confirm or correct their cultivar names. Out of approximately 9,000 Solanum tuberosum accessions included in EURISCO a total of 379 accessions from eight countries were genotyped with 12 SSR markers. Three recommendations had been made, including the use 9 out of the 12 markers that had been used in the AEGIS study and thus to contribute to the establishment of a central SSR-fingerprint database.  Link to the AEGIS Potato Project webpage

Previous events [link to ECPGR archive]