Colorado Potato Beetle Resistance in Solanum oplocense X Solanum tuberosum Intercross Hybrids and Metabolite Markers for Selection

• DOI: 10.1007/s12230-015-9484-2
• Publication Date: 2015-11-05T13:38:58Z
• Authors: Helen H. Tai; Kraig Worrall; David De Koeyer; Yvan Pelletier; George C. C. Tai; Larry Calhoun
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; 2. Zero hunger; 03 medical and health sciences

S. oplocense Hawkes, a wild relative of the potato S. tuberosum L. and source of resistance against the Colorado potato beetle Leptinotarsa decemlineata (Say) (CPB), was intercrossed with S. tuberosum. Backcross clones carried varying levels of resistance. Differences in foliar metabolites between resistant and susceptible clones were analyzed using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). Supervised machine learning classification methods uncorrelated shrunken centroids (USC), k-nearest neighbor (KNN) and support vector machines (SVM) were applied to develop algorithms that can classify resistant and susceptible plants using the metabolite data. Five metabolites were found to have a low error rate of prediction of CPB resistance. The five metabolites included two glycoalkaloids previously associated with resistance and susceptibility to CPB, dehydrocommersonine and solanine, respectively. Resistance was associated with a change in composition of glycoalkaloids to higher ratios of dehydrocommersonine over solanine.