The potato has its ancestor… the tomato, according to a recent study

It has been part of our daily lives for generations, but it holds many secrets. The potato, whose consumption by humans dates back 10,000 years in South America, still fuels controversy over the conditions of its appearance and domestication. Also, the discovery by an international team of researchers, published on July 31 in the American biology journal Cell , adds an important, and surprising, piece to the puzzle of its history: the potato descends from the tomato!

Biologists, geneticists, computer scientists, and statisticians joined forces in this vast study to go back in time and attempt to draw the phylogenetic tree of cultivated potato species. But the team was particularly interested in Petota , a lineage of wild tuber plants to which the potato is related. It is part of the large Solanaceae family, to which potatoes and tomatoes belong.

"Cultivated potatoes, although valuable, are genetically uniform due to artificial selection. We therefore chose a wild plant for our study because it offers a more diverse genetic makeup and allows us to observe natural evolutionary processes without the influence of human selection," explains Zhiyang Zhang, a researcher at the Shenzhen Institute of Agricultural Genomics (Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences), the first author of the study.

Analysis of the genome of 128 Petota specimens collected from its natural habitats in the Americas revealed that it is "of ancient hybrid origin, with all members exhibiting stable mixed genomic ancestry, derived from the etuberosum and tomato lineages approximately 8 to 9 million years ago," the researchers write in their article.

Etuberosum, found in southern Chile, has potato-like leaves and underground organs capable of regrowth. But these are rhizomes, underground stems, not tubers. The tomato, which needs no introduction, has about fifteen wild species, found exclusively in South and Central America.

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