Assessing the Effectiveness of Reflectance Spectroscopy Analysis to Determine Ploidy in Potato

While potato is an immensely important crop worldwide, its highly heterozygous, autotetraploid nature limits breeding progress. Converting potato to a diploid, inbred-hybrid crop will allow breeders to respond more quickly to changing environmental pressures and consumer demands. Breeders generate dihaploids by a cross between a cultivated tetraploid potato and a Solanum phureja inducer line, resulting in a reduction in ploidy. This cross has a low frequency of success and results in seeds of unknown ploidy. Here, we present the results of using reflectance spectroscopy analysis as a method to determine ploidy in seedlings following a cross with an inducer line. While our models showed high accuracy in determining ploidy, the specificity was insufficient for spectroscopic analysis to be a viable method for ploidy determination. These data also provide an example which suggests that, while a given phenotype distribution may shift after diploidization, breeding could be effective in making diploids that perform similarly to tetraploid varieties.