Food Safety
also see: Profiling Techniques
The film "What is in my potato" in this package shows that research is being carried out to uncover in great detail how potatoes may differ in constituents, depending on where they have been grown, which varieties are analysed, or whether they have been genetically modified.
History
Our potato , the species Solanum tuberosum, originated in the Andes mountains of Peru and Bolivia where farmers still grow many different varieties that have a remarkable diversity of colors and shapes since at least 2400 years. The potato, which is closely related to the tomato, pepper, and eggplant, spread from the Americas to the rest of the world after European colonization in the late 1400s and early 1500s. They have thus become the fourth most important food crop consumed worldwide after rice, wheat, and maize.
The current commercial cultivars (varieties) are tetraploids, which is the result of a natural doubling in chromosome number. Our food potato has also been given many extra genes for desired characteristics, such as disease and pest resistance, by making use of other wild and cultivated Solanum species, which provide a large source of genetic diversity for breeding purposes.
Research
Although potatoes will sometimes produce seed balls, the seed cannot be used by farmers because it is often infertile and never quite similar to the parent. This, and the complexity of its genome, also makes it difficult to further improve its qualities if one relies on natural breeding only. For vegetatively propagated crops, such as the potato, genetic modification (GM) for crop improvement offers significant potential. Within Europe, at least, genetic modification still remains controversial.
Common questions on GM crops are: what are the medium/long term effects? Are there environmental or ethical issues that need to be answered? Is a genetically modified potato as safe as a naturally improved potato when used in foods? Can we detect differences in composition when conventional grown potatoes are compared with GM potatoes or organically grown potatoes?
Just these questions are subject of the film in this package as well as in the longer version of the film, which is distributed to European schools.
Supporting materials
The European research project 'SAFE FOODS" investigates new procedures to carry out risk analyses of foods produced by different breeding approaches and production practices. A press release and a flyer are available here, as well as an abstract of the first results from this project.
