The transmission ability in a population of elite tetraploid potatoes

Crop potato, Solanum tuberosum L., has great genetic improvement potential, but vegetative propagation, tetrasomic inheritance, and inbreeding depression have limited genetic gain in the elite gene pool. To elucidate the transmission ability of breeding material in the current elite gene pool, we estimated the additive genetic variance and specific combining abilities among 18 parents for 10 key agronomic traits and evaluated the impact of genotypic information in capturing trait inheritance patterns using genomic prediction. Analysis of 5013 clones from an F₁ population of an 18-parent incomplete diallel cross showed that within the population, some traits had greater additive genetic effects, while others had greater nonadditive genetic contributions. There were clear differences in the breeding values between the evaluated parents. The effect of cytoplasmic genome type on phenotype was assessed and compared to its impact on fertility. These statistics were used to discuss the parental potential of the diallel parents. Including genotyping-by-sequencing information (available for 15% of the population) in a single-step approach improved the prediction accuracy of genetic breeding values, and, surprisingly, the greatest effect was observed for the genomic prediction of high-heritability traits. Increased prediction accuracy across multiple traits is crucial to support the breeder's decisions when selecting parents. The phenotypic and genetic correlations between traits were determined using pairwise bivariate models. Significant genetic correlations between several traits were identified, indicating that single-trait selection in breeding programs will result in the indirect selection of correlated traits-possibly with opposing additive contributions to different breeding goal traits by the same progenitor.