Journal of Taiwan Agricultural Research

Author:Lit-Fu Chan, Wen-Pin Tseng, Meng-Li Wei and Hsiu-Ying Lu*

Abstract:

    Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is the most important noncereal food crop in the world.  The transgenic potato plants, strain 2-1, were obtained by phytase-gene transformation into their original plants, cv. ‘Kennebec’. Here, we carried out an isolated field experiment to compare the plant growth and yield performance of both phytase transgenic and non-transgenic potato plants at Agricultural Research Institute in the fall of 2004 and 2005.  The results showed that the transgenic potato plants were slightly lower than non-transgenic potato plants in main stem length, lateral stem length, shoot dry matter and tuber fresh weight in three different growth periods, but the differences were not statistically significant (p>0.05).  The transgenic potato plants harboring phytase gene might not favor continuous cultivation using harvested seed potatoes because of significant number reduction of tuber with less than 120 g in the second-year cropping (2005).Phytase transgenic potato showed a significantly lower emergence rate than non-transgenic potato at 4 weeks after planting.

Key words:Potato, Genetically modified crops, Phytase gene, Tuber yield, Emergence rate

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