Roses and Sweetpotatoes: An Unusual Alliance

General Discussion
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Hi everyone, good to see you all again! It’s been a while since I last posted or checked in, but I’m happy to be back for winter break. I’ve been busy with school and a special breeding research project, which is actually the subject of this post. Throughout my breeding adventures, and during my job as LSU’s Ornamental and Specialty Sweetpotato Breeder, I’ve come to realize that it’s good to learn how to hybridize/breed at least 2 different crops.

For example, rose breeders and sweetpotato breeders can learn a lot from each other. Learning how other people do things has only helped my rose breeding skills, ideas, techniques, philosophies, etc. How specifically? Well regular “for food” sweetpotato breeders and ornamental sweetpotato breeders don’t exactly get along or see eye-to-eye, in the same way that a someone breeding for exhibition or florist hybrid teas, probably wouldn’t have many breeding goals in common with someone say, breeding for disease resistant shrub roses.

As such, it’s not surprising that regular commercial grade edible sweetpotatoes are never crossed with their ornamental foliaged, tiny (if any) starchy storage root producing brethren. Similar scenarios have happened much more often in the rose world. Yet when mitigated by trait introgression and crossing of diverse germplasm, has yielded positive results. Examples include David Austin, Ralph Moore, Dr. Basye, etc you know what I mean…

Finally, few of years ago when I started working for the sweetpotato breeding program, I ventured into seeing what would happen if this mentality was applied to the world of sweetpotatoes. I’m excited, proud, and humbled, to share with everyone the results of my work. Keep in mind just as with roses, I am merely standing on the shoulders of giants who came before me, and had the privilege of working with germplasm that has been in development for decades and even generations! Either way, I hope you check out the link and enjoy the video!

http://www.lsu.edu/agriculture/frontpagelinks/Barocco.php

-Andrew

P.S. Here’s a fun picture (not taken by me, but a symbollic image of my philosophy)
image.jpg

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Very good. Plant breeding needs a boost whenever it can get one.

What we really want up here is a purple-fleshed sweet potato (available in some asian stores) that also has purple foliage. That would be a double win for the Wildcats. I’m sure there’s a market for it, at alumni banquets if not elsewhere. We grow a lot of the purple ornamental types all over the campus ad elsewhere, but the tubers are pitifully small so far. And I haven’t gotten a source of viable purple-fleshed types yet.

P.S. this is not a joke. When people make contributions to scholarships in the thousands of dollars for the privilege of getting to sign up for a season ticket at the football stadium, they’re really deep into it, and money flows where opportunity springs up. Check out GTM sporting goods for an example here.

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And while you are at it, develop a larger, tastier, juicier purple tuber. The ones we get at the market are just short of pathetic. And sometimes they are not very purple/blue. I do not think anyone has put much effort into this aspect of sweet potatoes but there is a ready niche market for them, which should be able to be expanded much like the purple and orange cauliflower. Those were sports but I believe the purple sweet potato is just another long ago developed variety. It’s big problem is that it is so dry fleshed, and health foodies who want to capture the raw juice, rich in anthocyanins (cyanidin and peonidin) find this almost impossible in its’ raw, healthy state. Stokes has a patented variety of purple that might be a little better but the ones I see are the Asian market variety. Thank you for sharing this little side plant breeding adventure, Andrew.

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Larry,
While I was attending K-State, I had the idea that a purple and white rose (either bicolor or striped) might be popular in the area. I wasn’t doing any breeding at the time (no room) so the idea went nowhere.

A few years ago, while visiting the Lexington, KY arboretum, I saw an ear of multicolor corn that had a kernel (maybe two) that was white with a blue dot near the tip. The Kentucky wildcats are blue and white, so I imagined the possibility …

If you like purple root crops, check out Tom Silvers’ purple radishes.

And for purple sweet potatoes:
http://www.sandhillpreservation.com/pages/sweetpotato_catalog.html

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Andrew,
You make a good point. In fact, there is much to be learned, and techniques to be adopted.
For instance, it is possible to “breed” sweet potatoes without waiting for seeds. Shoots arising from roots are much inclined to vary from the parent, whereas stem cuttings (used in the tropics) are more stable.

J. Amer. Soc. Hort. Sci. 120(5): 734-740
Variation in randomly amplified DNA markers and storage root yield in ‘Jewel’ sweetpotato clones
Arthur Q. Villordon and Don R. LaBonte
“The mode of propagation can also contribute to the crop’s predisposition to genetic variability. In tropical propagation systems, the sweetpotato is virtually a perennial, where stem cuttings are collected from standing crops in a continuous planting procedure (Simmonds, 1976). In contrast, the crop is grown as an annual in the United States and in other subtropical production areas. In these areas, the sweetpotato sprout is the unit of propagation. These sprouts are derived from adventitious buds on storage roots. Adventitious buds may develop in callus, wound periderm, the vascular cambium or in anomalous cambia (Edmond and Ammerman, 1971; Fahn, 1982). Adventitious bud production, particularly from callus or anomalous cambia, originate from previously non-meristematic cells. This nonmeristematic origin can contribute to systematic variability in subsequent generations.”
Ashspublications.org

The science is new, but the breeding technique of vegetative selection is old.

The American Farmer, 50-51 (May 5, 1826)
ON THE CHANGING OF SEED
Joseph Cooper
“A complaint is very general, that potatoes of every kind degenerate, at which I am not surprised, when the most proper means to produce that effect is constantly practiced; to wit, using or selling the best, and planting the refuse; by which means, almost the whole of those planted are the produce of plants the most degenerated. This consideration induced me to try an opposite method. Having often observed that some plants or vines produced potatoes larger, better shaped, and in greater abundance than others, without any apparent reason, except the operation of nature, it induced me to save a quantity from such only, for planting the ensuing season, and I was highly gratified in finding their production exceed that of the others, of the same kind, planted at the same time, and with every equal advantage, beyond my expectation, in size, shape, and quantity; by continuing the practice, I am satisfied that I have been fully compensated for all the additional trouble.”

A circumstance happened respecting potatoes, which may be worth relating: a woman whom I met in market, requested me to bring half a bushel of sweet potatoes for seed, the next market day, which I promised to do; but going through the market on that day, previous to her son’s coming for the potatoes, I observed the woman selling such as I had brought for her; when the boy came, I asked him the reason they wanted potatoes for seed, while they were selling their own. His answer was, that his father said, if they did not get seed from me, once in three or four years, their potatoes would be good for nothing. Query—if he had used the same means in selecting his potatoes for planting, as I did, whether he would have profited by changing with one who used the other method?"
Cooper: Selecting Seeds, Corn, Potato (1799))

I had (but cannot find) a note on a handful of sports that arose from root cuttings of ‘Paul Crampel’. Other root sports are ‘Happenstance’ and ‘Little Mermaid’, both from ‘Mermaid’, and ‘New Dawn’ from ‘Dr. W. Van Fleet’.