Enhancing growth of multiple potato varieties using innovative strategies for breaking dormancy”

Abstract

Potatoes (Solanum tuberosum L.) are the fourth most produced crop globally, following wheat, maize, and rice. The potato industry faces challenges such as unpredictable germination and high levels of steroidal glycoalkaloids, but recent research has addressed these issues by exploring potato development, dormancy mechanisms, and techniques to break dormancy and promote sprouting. An in vitro experiment at the Potato Research Institute, Sahiwal, using a complete randomized design with factorial arrangement, applied various treatments—including thio-urea, gibberellic acid, neem-coated urea, ambient conditions, light, darkness, and varying temperatures—to potato tubers to break dormancy. Thio-urea proved unusually successful, significantly reducing the dormancy period for several potato varieties and increasing sprouting density in Ijaz-22 and Ruby. Gibberellic acid consistently stimulated sprouting in all tested varieties, with Kashmir outperforming control varieties in terms of sprouting density and length, as well as lowering days to emergence and breaking dormancy. However, neem-coated urea had no meaningful effect on dormancy. Environmental parameters such as ambient conditions, darkness, light exposure, and temperature regimes showed varying effects on tuber sprouting behavior, revealing genotype-specific responses. No effect of hot water treatment was seen in experiment but in fact hot water inhibits sprouting. Overall, our findings highlight the diverse physiological responses of potato tubers to various treatments, which are influenced by their environments. This is critical for optimizing potato growing techniques and increasing crop production. Ultimately it is recommended that thio urea, gibberellic acid, darkness and varying temperatures are best treatments to break dormancy