Growth or Defence – How to Increase Potato Yield

To study growth-defence trade-offs in the context of metabolism in crops, scientists from the Universities of Potsdam and Erlangen, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, and the National Institute of Biology, Ljubljana, have generated the genome-scale metabolic model potato-GEM. The first large-scale metabolic reconstruction of its kind presents a useful resource to breed plant varieties with improved stress tolerance and high yields in the future.

With rising global population, the demand for food is growing, too. Changing environmental conditions lead to annual losses amounting to billions of euros per crop. To ensure food supply for people, crops must be made fit for the future in terms of yield and quality.