I have recently come by potatoes from tps. After fermenting the seeds from the small fruit - tomato style - and planting it out the next season I now have a nice segregating population. (The original potato I saved seed from was an F1 hybrid). For the rest you can just continue through your cycles of selection as normal.
SAVeg

Hi Glen!

Breeding potatoes is fascinating. I earned my Masters in plant breeding working with wild potato species. I screened various populations of Mexican and South American species for resistance to late blight (caused the Irish potato famine and new aggressive forms of the pathogen has emerged in the last decade or so). I then began to breed in the resistance to modern potatoes.

True Potato Seed (TPS) is wonderful for especially developing countries because of ease of storage and being essentially virus free. For developed countries where great uniformity is necessary for processing it probably will never catch on. There is just too much segregation going on in TPS hybrids for most developed markets. Potatoes resist inbreeding (strong inbreeding depression), so it would be hard to inbreed parents to bring them to homozygosity so when two of them are crossed their progeny will be uniform. For countries where biomass and food is the major concern, TPS is wonderful.

A great web site is the Potato Association of America. From that site you can get a link to the US potato germplasm repository in Sturgeon Bay, WI. You may ask for seeds of material you are interested in and typically they send it out for free. I was able to visit the center a couple years ago and greatly enjoyed seeing their facility and was impressed how much they accomplish with such a limited budget.

Sincerely,
David

i have done a bit of research in the past year on potatoes and found out that there is a lot of money involved. I know that some universities will give you $1 million for the patent of a potato with just a small change in flavor or any thing else that you can change. now the problem just comes to makeing that small change.
good luck
jason

Ewald Eliason is a potato breeder who has a prominent place in Carol Deppe's book.
Billy

Potato is very difficult to breed because of its tetraploidity. It will take 12-16 years for a commercial breeder to create a new variety (including testing and apllication ofcourse). If you're not too concerned with uniformity etc you could make some crosses and have fun with it however.

So what qualities do I need to breed into my potatoes to get the million bucks . where can I find A LIST OF AGRICULTURAL BREAKTHROUGHS THAT HAVE THESE LARGE REWARDS ???

Check Carol Deppes book " Breeding Your Own Vegetables" .
They have a guy that is breeding potatoes for the better blooms .