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The European Cultivated Potato Database (ECPD) is an online collaborative database of potato variety descriptions. The information that it contains can be searched by variety name, or by selecting one or more required characteristics.
The data is indexed by variety, character, country of origin, and contributor. There is a facility to select a variety and to find similar varieties based upon botanical characteristics.
ECPD is the result of collaboration between participants in eight European Union countries and five East European countries. It is intended to be a source of information on varieties maintained by them. More than twenty-three scientific organisations are contributing to this information source.
The database is maintained and updated by the Scottish Agricultural Science Agency within the framework of the European Cooperative Programme for Crop Genetic Resources Networks (ECP/GR), which is organised by Bioversity International. The European Cultivated Potato Database was created to advance the conservation and use of genetic diversity for the well-being of present and future generations.
The potato is a root vegetable native to the Americas, a starchy tuber of the plant Solanum tuberosum, and the plant itself is a perennial in the nightshade family, Solanaceae.
The sweet potato or sweetpotato is a dicotyledonous plant that belongs to the bindweed or morning glory family, Convolvulaceae. Its large, starchy, sweet-tasting, tuberous roots are a root vegetable. The young shoots and leaves are sometimes eaten as greens. The sweet potato is distantly related to the common potato, both being in the order Solanales. The sweet potato, especially the orange variety, is often called a "yam" in parts of North America, but it is entirely unrelated to true yams. Cultivars of the sweet potato have been bred to bear tubers with flesh and skin of many colors, but white, yellow, and orange flesh is common with a darker skin.
Phytophthora infestans is an oomycete or water mold, a microorganism that causes the serious potato and tomato disease known as late blight or potato blight. Early blight, caused by Alternaria solani, is also often called "potato blight". Late blight was a major culprit in the 1840s European, the 1845 - 1852 Irish, and the 1846 Highland potato famines. The organism can also infect some other members of the Solanaceae. The pathogen is favored by moist, cool environments: sporulation is optimal at 12–18 °C (54–64 °F) in water-saturated or nearly saturated environments, and zoospore production is favored at temperatures below 15 °C (59 °F). Lesion growth rates are typically optimal at a slightly warmer temperature range of 20 to 24 °C.
A cultivar is an assemblage of plants selected for desirable characteristics that are maintained during propagation. More generally, a cultivar is the most basic classification category of cultivated plants in the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP). Most cultivars arise in cultivation, but some are from wild plants that have distinctive characteristics.
A breed is a specific group of domestic animals having homogeneous appearance (phenotype), homogeneous behavior, and/or other characteristics that distinguish it from other organisms of the same species. In literature, there exist several slightly deviating definitions. Breeds are formed through genetic isolation and either natural adaptation to the environment or selective breeding, or a combination of the two. Despite the centrality of the idea of "breeds" to animal husbandry and agriculture, no single, scientifically accepted definition of the term exists. It was shown by set-theoretic means that for the term breed an infinite number of different definitions, which more or less meet the common requirements found in literature, can be given. A breed is therefore not an objective or biologically verifiable classification but is instead a term of art amongst groups of breeders who share a consensus around what qualities make some members of a given species members of a nameable subset.
Genetic diversity is the total number of genetic characteristics in the genetic makeup of a species, it ranges widely from the number of species to differences within species and can be attributed to the span of survival for a species. It is distinguished from genetic variability, which describes the tendency of genetic characteristics to vary.
Ullucus is a genus of flowering plants in the family Basellaceae, with one species, Ullucus tuberosus, a plant grown primarily as a root vegetable, secondarily as a leaf vegetable. The name ulluco is derived from the Quechua word ulluku, but depending on the region, it has many different names. These include illaco, melloco, chungua or ruba, olluco or papa lisa, or Ulluma.
A landrace is a domesticated, locally adapted, traditional variety of a species of animal or plant that has developed over time, through adaptation to its natural and cultural environment of agriculture and pastoralism, and due to isolation from other populations of the species. Landraces are generally distinguished from cultivars, and from breeds in the standardized sense, although the term landrace breed is sometimes used as distinguished from the term standardized breed when referring to cattle.
Malus sieversii is a wild apple native to the mountains of Central Asia in southern Kazakhstan. It has recently been shown to be the primary ancestor of most cultivars of the domesticated apple. It was first described in 1833 by Carl Friedrich von Ledebour, a German naturalist who saw them growing in the Altai Mountains.
The Ratte potato is a small potato with a unique nutty flavor and smooth, buttery texture. The nutty flavour is said to have come from the types of soils the variety is grown in by the French farmers. This potato has an ovate shape, often with a slight curve and golden speckled skin. The flesh of this potato is a golden yellow and its texture maintains even when cooking. The variety originated in Denmark or France, in the late 19th century and is a favorite of French chefs, including Joël Robuchon who used them to make potato puree. Other chefs have recommended roughly mashing them or using them in salads or casseroles. The New York Times reported that its taste "hints richly of hazelnuts and chestnuts". This variety is known for its excellent texture and flavour, it is normally harvested by hand and low yielding. Because of the low yield and hand harvest this variety fetches a high price and it is known as a boutique potato.
A cultigen or cultivated plant is a plant that has been deliberately altered or selected by humans; it is the result of artificial selection. These anthropogenic plants, for the most part, have commercial value in horticulture, agriculture or forestry. Because cultigens are defined by their mode of origin and not by where they are growing, plants meeting this definition remain cultigens whether they are naturalised in the wild, deliberately planted in the wild, or growing in cultivation.
Solanum bulbocastanum, the ornamental nightshade, is a plant in the family Solanaceae, native to Mexico and parts of the U.S. Southwest. It is closely related to the potato and, as it has evolved strong resistance to all known varieties of potato blight, has been used to genetically engineer resistance into the cultivated varieties of potatoes around the world. The use of genetic engineering is helpful, as efforts to hybridize by traditional methods have so far been unsuccessful, and the use of somatic hybridization to transfer genes is difficult. A resistance to the Columbia root-knot nematode Meloidogyne chitwoodi has been identified in S. bulbocastanum, which can be transferred to cultivated potato.
Crop diversity is the variance in genetic and phenotypic characteristics of plants used in agriculture. Over the past 50 years, there has been a major decline in two components of crop diversity; genetic diversity within each crop and the number of species commonly grown.
The Vitis International Variety Catalogue (VIVC) is a database of various species and varieties/cultivars of grapevine, the genus Vitis. VIVC is administered by the Geilweilerhof Institute for Grape Breeding in Siebeldingen, Germany, and contains information from grapevine collections existing in various institutes of viticulture around the world. As of April 2009, the information in the database brought together information from 130 institutions located in 45 countries, and contains about 18,000 entries.
Istituto di Genetica Vegetale (IGV) is a research network om Plant Genetics and Breeding within the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. IGV is headquartered in Bari and has four different Divisions in Portici, Palermo, Florence and Perugia. IGV started its activities on November 2002.
ECPD may refer to:
Plant breeding is the science of changing the traits of plants in order to produce desired characteristics. It has been used to improve the quality of nutrition in products for humans and animals. The goals of plant breeding are to produce crop varieties that boast unique and superior traits for a variety of agricultural applications. The most frequently addressed traits are those related to biotic and abiotic stress tolerance, grain or biomass yield, end-use quality characteristics such as taste or the concentrations of specific biological molecules and ease of processing . Plant breeding can be accomplished through many different techniques ranging from simply selecting plants with desirable characteristics for propagation, to methods that make use of knowledge of genetics and chromosomes, to more complex molecular techniques. Genes in a plant are what determine what type of qualitative or quantitative traits it will have. Plant breeders strive to create a specific outcome of plants and potentially new plant varieties.
Domesticated species and the human populations that domesticate them are typified by a mutualistic relationship of interdependence, in which humans have over thousands of years modified the genomics of domesticated species. Genomics is the study of the structure, content, and evolution of genomes, or the entire genetic information of organisms. Domestication is the process by which humans alter the morphology and genes of targeted organisms by selecting for desirable traits.
The lists of cultivars in the table below are indices of plant cultivars, varieties, and strains. A cultivar is a plant that is selected for desirable characteristics that can be maintained by propagation.
Redcliffe Nathan Salaman was a British botanist and potato breeder. His landmark work was the 1949 book The History and Social Influence of the Potato, which established the history of nutrients as a new literary genre.