Play episode on Spotify

This episode of the Computomics Podcast features Vanessa Prigge, potato breeder and R&D project manager at Saka Pflanzenzucht (Solana Group). She discusses her international research background, the unique challenges of potato breeding - such as vegetative propagation, complex genetics, and long breeding cycles - and the need for compromise-driven selection. Vanessa highlights two major projects: IPMorama, which promotes integrated pest management through resistant varieties, monitoring, and stakeholder collaboration, and POMORROW, which unlocks potato gene bank diversity for future-proof breeding. Together, these efforts aim to make potato breeding more sustainable, collaborative, and future-ready.

More:

• Solana is an owner-managed group focused on potato breeding since 1905, seed potato production and sales to more than 50 countries, and farming on more than 10,000 hectares. Solana Main Page
• IPMorama is an EU-funded Horizon Europe project with the ambition of integrating tools, resources and knowledge across the practice ecosystem for the development and use of IPM-centric varieties of potato, wheat and grain legumes in variety-centric IPM strategies. IPMorama Project Website
• To contribute to virulence monitoring you can access the Wheat Rust Survey App and the Potato Late Blight Tracker App with the links below
  https://insights.ipmorama.eu/ and https://agro.au.dk/forskning/internationale-platforme/euroblight
  
• POMORROW is a BMFTR-funded project that aims at lifting the treasure of potato genetic resources (PGR) stored in the German Federal Ex situ Gene Bank by characterising > 6000 accessions and developing genome editing tools and predictive breeding methods to efficiently exploit the useful genetic variation contained in PGR for potato breeding. More information: https://www.pflanzenforschung.de/de/pflanzenwissen/journal/kartoffeln-fuer-morgen (in German)
• Vanessa Prigge on LinkedIn
  
  

Vanessa Prigge is a potato breeder and R&D project manager at Solana Group where she runs national and European research collaborations. Vanessa chairs section ‘Potato’ of the European Association for Research on Plant Breeding (EUCARPIA) and has co-organised scientific conferences of the section in Germany and Scotland. She holds a PhD in Plant Breeding and Applied Genetics from University of Hohenheim and was awarded the Josef G. Knoll European Science Award in 2012 for her PhD research at CIMMYT, Mexico. As a strong believer in collaboration, Vanessa enjoys bringing people together for the benefit of plant research which is reflected in her being listed as 20 Most Influential Women in the EU Seed Sector 2024.