Potatoes are a frequent customer on people's dining tables, but for breeders, cultivating high-quality potato varieties is a challenge. On May 4, 2023 (Beijing time), the international academic journal Cell published the latest achievements of Huang Sanwen's team from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences Shenzhen Institute of Agricultural Genomics online. By tracking the evolution trace of potato genome for up to 80 million years and 1.2 billion years in total, the first two-dimensional map of harmful mutations in potatoes was drawn. This map will effectively assist breeders in predicting potential gene "stepping holes" in potato breeding, thereby greatly accelerating the breeding process of hybrid potatoes. This achievement marks China's entry into the world's leading position in the basic theory and technology of potato breeding. Huang Sanwen, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences Shenzhen Institute of Agricultural Genomics, said that potato is an important food crop in the world and the fourth major grain crop in China. It has the advantages of high yield, low water consumption and wide planting area. However, from a genomic perspective, traditional cultivated potatoes belong to autotetraploid, with a more complex genome than general crops, making breeding and improvement very difficult. Even some globally grown processed potato varieties are still bred over 120 years ago. In addition, traditional potato cultivation using potato blocks also faces problems such as low reproductive coefficient, high storage and transportation costs, and susceptibility to carrying diseases and pests. In order to solve the above problems, in recent years, Huang Sanwen's team, together with domestic and foreign advantageous units, has launched the "excellent potato plan", which aims to transform tetraploid potatoes into diploid potatoes, replace potato block propagation with seed propagation, guide potato breeding with genomics and synthetic biology, completely change the breeding and reproduction methods of potatoes, and shorten the breeding cycle of potatoes from the original 10 to 12 years to 3 to 5 years. Studies have found that most diploid potatoes cannot produce mature seeds after self pollination. At the same time, harmful gene mutations accumulated in the traditional breeding process will cause the decline of potato fecundity and yield, that is, self pollination decline, which has become two major obstacles to the process of potato breeding. In response to the above issues, Huang Sanwen's team has successively analyzed the genomes and pangenomes of haploid, diploid, and tetraploid potatoes, preliminarily analyzed the genetic basis of inbreeding decline, and cultivated the first generation of inbred line materials and hybrid varieties. In order to further achieve rapid variety improvement and efficiently eliminate harmful mutations in the potato genome, the research team collected a large number of Solanaceae species resources and completed genome assembly and omics evolution analysis of Solanaceae. These materials have a maximum evolution time of 80 million years, with a cumulative evolution time of 1.2 billion years. Researchers have traced the accumulation of mutations and selection results during this evolutionary history to draw the first two-dimensional map of harmful mutations in potatoes, providing a new basis for identifying potato functional sites and eliminating harmful mutations. Huang Sanwen stated that this discovery has put potato breeding on a fast track, which can better help breeders make early breeding decisions, further reduce breeding costs, and is expected to increase the efficiency of potato hybrid breeding by about 50%. Li Jiayang, academician of the CAS Member, commented that the research results will play an important guiding role not only in potatoes, but also in grains, oils, fruits, vegetables and tea. Looking at the New Era