This will help meet the challenge of feeding the world's soaring population as potatoes provide the world's fourth-largest crop, with an annual, global yield of 330 million tons.
Researchers at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee (Scotland), which contributed to this discovery, reckons that it should soon be possible to produce improved varieties of potato at a more rapid rate.
The genome is the ordering of genes in a haploid set of chromosomes of a particular organism, wherein each gene controls different aspects of how the organism grows and develops; and slight changes in these instructions give rise to different varieties.
According to professor Iain Gordon, chief executive of the James Hutton Institute, decrypting the potato genome would enable breeders to produce diversities of the crop which would be more nutritious, as well as immune to pests and diseases.
Though it is an important discovery, the complete research is far from being concluded, and may take up to a decade to thoroughly breed an improved variety.
