Abstract
Increasing global food production to feed rapidly growing populations where cultivable land area is limited is a serious challenge. Moreover, increasing production costs, with high fertilizer input costs, particularly using nitrogen (N), and degrading soil health are the major concerns when enhancing the sustainable agricultural food production. Potato, being the major non-cereal food crop globally, is a heavy N fertilizer feeder crop. In the past several agricultural best management practices have been discussed regarding N management in potato crop production through the intervention of agronomy and soil science. However, unlike the advances in other model plants and cereals, the application of molecular genomics tools is lacking in potato, hence it is not possible to enhance plant genetic potential with better nitrogen use efficiency (NUE). Better N-use efficient plants can be grown with less fertilizer input and also on poor soil. This chapter highlights the application of novel genomics tools to improve NUE in potato through the discovery of novel genes and markers for applications in molecular breeding methods and gene manipulation (transgenic) techniques.
