Potato Genome Editing: Recent Challenges and a Practical Procedure

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is one of the most important staple crops, accounting for the fourth highest production in the world. To date, many studies on potatoes using genome-editing technologies have been reported. These studies cover a wide range of fields including new trait development, analysis of gene functions, and improvement in genome-editing technology. Trait-related genes are one of the major targets of genome editing, leading to improvement in crop productivity and the properties of storage starch, as well as increased tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses. Technical advances in potato genome editing facilitate precise nucleotide substitutions, the establishment of mutants of interest with high efficiency, and the elimination of CRISPR/Cas9 and selection marker genes retained in the product genomes. In this chapter, we review recent studies on genome editing in potato and our improved method that achieved high efficiency in targeted mutagenesis for the gene of interest.