Changing consumer attitudes with late-blight-resistant GM potatoes in Sweden – International Potato Center

Breeders have successfully developed high-yielding potato varieties well-adapted to a wide range of countries, but resistance to late blight has been a challenge. While some of the potato’s wild relatives are highly resistant, getting the genes responsible for that resistance from wild potatoes into commercially viable ones has resulted in potatoes with bitterness or other characteristics people don’t like. This requires a long and tedious process of backcrossing to weed out undesirable “wild” traits.