Potato plants micropropagated and grown from mini tubers: nutritional efficiency to phosphorus

One of the main concerns for the establishment of sustainable agriculture is the development of cultivars that absorb and use phosphorus (P) better. It is possible to produce quality seed potatoes from sprouts, microtubers, minitubers and minicuttings in closed off-soil growing systems. However, little is known if the origin of the propagating material interferes with the nutritional efficiency of phosphorus (P) by plants. Thus, the objective of this work was to compare the nutritional efficiency of P between plants produced from minitubers and micropropagation. For this, two experiments were carried out, one with plants produced from mini-tubers and the other from plants from micropropagation. Both experiments were carried out in a greenhouse and in a growing system without soil, using clones Asterix, Atlantic, SMIC 148-A and SMINIA 793101-3 and two levels of P in the nutrient solution (2.32 and 23. 2mg P L-1). The propagative origin of potato plants changes with the biomass ratio between root and shoot and plants from minitubers have a higher harvest rate, higher utilization efficiency and a higher P response rate in P biomass production than plants from micropropagation. Therefore, we recommend that selection of PUE clones should occur with plants from mini-tubers, since the responses to PUE by plants from micropropagation are not representative, under the conditions tested in this work