Field Crop 2025, Vol.8, No.2, 82-92 http://cropscipublisher.com/index.php/fc 90 also be put to use in Asia. Ultimately, to address the challenges brought about by climate change, it requires the joint efforts of scientists around the world. 8 Concluding Remarks Research on QTL in potatoes has indeed yielded considerable results over the years. Just in the tetraploid population, 39 key loci have been identified-ranging from the appearance of the tubers to their cooking characteristics, and even when they germinate (with high heritability reaching 92% and low at 54%). Interestingly, the QTLS that control flower color always cluster on chromosomes II, III, and V, often adjacent to the sites of leaf maturity. The most powerful one is the "early maturity switch" on chromosome 5 (contributing 33.55%), which is simply a magic tool for shortening the breeding cycle. However, these findings also expose the complexity of potato genetics: the same trait may be regulated by more than a dozen minor QTLS, and some loci are even linked to undesirable traits. Nowadays, making marker-assisted selection is like defusing a bomb; one has to be extremely careful to retain only the favorable alleles. Fortunately, with the improvement of positioning accuracy, these problems are being solved one by one, providing the possibility for cultivating "all-round" varieties. Potato breeding is becoming increasingly sophisticated nowadays. Those QTL loci that control important agronomic traits are like providing breeders with a "genetic manual". For instance, the traits of early maturity and high starch content were originally thought to restrict each other, but it was found that their QTLS were not in the same position at all-this opened the door to breeding new varieties of "early maturity and high starch". New technologies such as polyploid QTL-seq add the finishing touch. The molecular markers developed have increased the selection efficiency several times over. Now, without waiting for the harvest, it is possible to predict at the seedling stage which plants have the potential for high yield, disease resistance and excellent quality. To be honest, the most practical aspect of these technologies lies in their ability to avoid "chain burdens"-in the past, when selecting disease-resistant varieties, low-yield genes were often accidentally introduced. Now, through precise positioning, only the necessary gene fragments can be retained. Of course, for laboratory achievements to truly benefit farmers, they still need to be verified in the fields. However, it is undeniable that these QTL markers are transforming potato breeding from "empiricism" to "precise design", providing new tools for addressing the challenges of climate change and food security. The next step in potato QTL research is to explore the "deep water zone". The 471kb target area of the early maturity is like a treasure chest. There must be more delicate regulatory elements that haven't been discovered inside-perhaps some non-coding area is the real "switch". Nowadays, merely looking at the genome is no longer sufficient for research. It is necessary to string together transcriptome data and field phenotypes for analysis, just like piecing together a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. CRISPR technology is particularly useful here. It can directly "perform surgery" on candidate genes to verify their functions, which is much faster than the past backcrossover verification. However, the most crucial point is still to expand the scope of verification. The same QTL may perform exceptionally well in local Andean species but cease to exist in modern cultivated species. So we plan to set up experimental sites in different ecological zones of the northern and southern hemispheres, and even include wild relatives in the research. After all, climate change is so drastic that the drought-resistant QTL discovered today might become a lifeline in a few years. Although these tasks are time-consuming and labor-intensive, they enable breeders to obtain truly "resistant" molecular markers. Acknowledgments I thank the relevant institutions and the funders for providing the resources and financial support for this study. Conflict of Interest Disclosure The author affirms that this research was conducted without any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. References Afshari H., Barzin E., Laei G., and Noryan M., 2017, Genetic diversity and relationships among traits in potato genotypes using agronomic traits and molecular marker (SSR), Plant Physiology, 7(3): 2095-2103. https://doi.org/10.22034/IJPP.2017.533563
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