Genetic Fingerprinting of Potato Varieties from the Northwest Potato Variety Development Program

The Northwest Potato Variety Development (NWPVD) Program has released 45 improved potato varieties since 1985. Thirty-four potato varieties, four breeding clones and two advanced selections from NWPVD Program, and six commonly-grown potato varieties were fingerprinted using 32 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers and 12,808 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers. Of 32 SSR markers, 29 exhibited significant polymorphism across all the 46 potato clones studied. A total of 143 alleles were observed with an average of 4.6 alleles per SSR marker. These markers span all 12 chromosomes of potato, with a maximum of five markers from chromosome VIII and minimum of one marker from chromosome VI. The polymorphic information content (PIC) and expected heterozygosity (H_e) of the SSR markers ranges between 0.18 to 0.75 and 0.20 to 0.78, respectively. Based on PIC, H_e, and ease of scoring, we recommend a set of eight SSR markers: STG0016, STI0004, STI0012, STI0023, STI0030, STI0033, STM1016 and STM1104 for fingerprinting NWPVD varieties. Out of 12,808 SNPs, 88.8% resulted in reliable three cluster diploid calling of which 87.8% were polymorphic. Tetraploid calling resulted in 44.2% of SNPs of which 94.5% were polymorphic. Our study provided fingerprinting resources for the NWPVD varieties and can be used in issues related to intellectual property rights, ownership, trademark and diversity analysis.