Genome diversity of the potato

Hardigan et al state that the genetic diversity of the potato is much greater than that of other major crops, based on 68.9 million SNPs identified from the resequencing of 67 accessions of wild and cultivated potatoes. We questioned this conclusion based on our own original analysis of wild and cultivated potato species and estimates of genomic SNPs in other major crops by next-generation resequencing with a few to 15 million SNPs. Examples include soybean, pigeon pea, cotton, tomato, and potato. Here, Huang et al explore this further, they reanalyzed the raw data from ref. 1 using standard, stricter methods to filter SNPs and then reanalyzed the data from both studies with similar subsets of cultivated and wild species, focusing on only diploid germplasm.