Potato

The potato is a starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial nightshade Solanum tuberosum L. The word "potato" may refer to the plant, itself, in addition to the edible tuber. In the Andes, where the species is indigenous, there are some other closely related cultivated potato species. Potatoes were introduced outside the Andes region four centuries ago, and have become an integral part of much of the world's food supply. It is the world's fourth-largest food crop, following maize, wheat and rice.[1] Long-term storage of potatoes requires specialised care in cold warehouses.[2]

Wild potato species occur throughout the Americas, from the United States to southern Chile.[3] The potato was originally believed to have been domesticated independently in multiple locations,[4] but later genetic testing of the wide variety of cultivars and wild species proved a single origin for potatoes in the area of present-day southern Peru and extreme northwestern Bolivia (from a species in the Solanum brevicaule complex), where they were domesticated 7,000–10,000 years ago.[5][6][7] Following centuries of selective breeding, there are now over a thousand different types of potatoes.[6] Of these subspecies, a variety that at one point grew in the Chiloé Archipelago (the potato's south-central Chilean sub-center of origin) left its germplasm on over 99% of the cultivated potatoes worldwide.[8][9]

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