Analytical Breeding in Potato - In a crop like potato, the genetic improvement through crosses and selection may be achieved at the dihaploid level and improved dihaploids may then be used for chromosome doubling to get increased tuber size.

This has been described as analytical breeding (Chase, 1963), which has the following advantages:

(i) disomic inheritance in the dihaploids provides simpler inheritance ratios, ease of selection and smaller population size required to recover recombinants;

(ii) dihaploids can be crossed with wild diploid species for introducing new germplasm;

(iii) the dihaploids, represent a level of homozygosity equivalent to three generations of self pollination in an autotetraploid.