Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) ranked third most important crop and ranked first among the non-cereal crops. Further, its demand is increasing because of its high-industrial value and population blast. However, Earth’s temperature is increasing continuously due to global warming, which has undesirable impact on potato production. The ideal night temperature for tuber formation is ~17°C and night temperature beyond 22°C reduces the tuber yield drastically. The previous studies reported different genes involved in the regulation of transcriptional factors, sugar transport, photosynthesis, hormonal activity and expressed under high temperatures. However, no detailed report is available which provide insight to the complete scenario of the role of these genes in tuberisation. Based upon the present day scenario, here we reviewed the effects of increasing global temperature on potato crop, tuber yield and quality. The review described how various molecular pathways involved in potato tuberisation gets effected by heat stress and offer various potential candidate genes that might play important roles in the development of thermo-tolerant potato varieties. We also discussed the pivotal role of wild species in breeding programmes, capabilities of biotechnological tools, agronomic practices and remote sensing in sustainable potato production under changing climate.

Heat stress as a yield limiting issue has become a major threat for food security as global warming progresses. Being sessile, plants cannot avoid heat stress. They respond to heat stress by activating complex molecular networks, such as signal transduction, metabolite production and expressions of heat stress-associated genes. Some plants have developed an intricate signalling network to respond and adapt it. Heat stress tolerance is a polygenic trait, which is regulated by various genes, transcriptional factors, proteins and hormones. Therefore, to improve heat stress tolerance, a sound knowledge of various mechanisms involved in the response to heat stress is required. The classical breeding methods employed to enhance heat stress tolerance has had limited success. In this era of genomics, next generation sequencing techniques, availability of genome sequences and advanced biotechnological tools open several windows of opportunities to improve heat stress tolerance in crop plants. This review discusses the potential of various functional genomic approaches, such as genome wide association studies, microarray, and suppression subtractive hybridization, in the process of discovering novel genes related to heat stress, and their functional validation using both reverse and forward genetic approaches. This review also discusses how these functionally validated genes can be used to improve heat stress tolerance through plant breeding, transgenics and genome editing approaches.

Drought stress is the most important abiotic stress that constrains crop production and reduces yield drastically. The germplasm of most of the cultivated crops possesses numerous unknown drought stress tolerant genes. Moreover, there are many reports suggesting that the wild species of most of the modern cultivars have abiotic stress tolerant genes. Due to climate change and population booms, food security has become a global issue. To develop drought tolerant crop varieties knowledge of various genes involved in drought stress is required. Different reverse genetic approaches such as virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS), clustered regularly interspace short palindromic repeat (CRISPR), targeting induced local lesions in genomes (TILLING) and expressed sequence tags (ESTs) have been used extensively to study the functionality of different genes involved in response to drought stress. In this review, we described the contributions of different techniques of functional genomics in the study of drought tolerant genes.

The allelic variations in a diversity panel of 353 potato accessions, including 256 accessions belonging to Solanum tuberosum sub spp. tuberosum, 49 accessions belonging to Solanum tuberosum sub spp. andigena, and 48 Indian potato varieties were analysed using 25 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. The SSR allelic profiles revealed high levels of polymorphism and distinctness among the accessions studied. A total of 343 alleles of 25 SSR markers were observed in the diversity panel of 353 highly diverse tetraploid potato accessions. The number of alleles produced per SSR varied from 8 for the marker STM1053 to 25 for the marker STIKA. The polymorphic information content (PIC) ranged from 0.66 (STG0010) to 0.93 (STM1106) with an average of 0.82. The cluster analysis using the SSR allelic profiles of 353 accessions divided the population into five major groups. The association mapping for late blight resistance identified six markers with the general linear model (GLM), and out of these six markers significance of three markers was reconfirmed with the mixed linear model (MLM). The findings of this study suggest that SSRs are the appropriate markers for evaluating genetic diversity and population structure within different potato germplasm collections. A significant diversity across the tetraploid potato accessions was observed. Moreover, the markers identified in this study could be useful in marker-assisted selection (MAS) breeding in potato for late blight resistance (LBR).