Agrobiodiversity - You say potato, I say Solanum tuberosum?

AGRICOLTURA

What do you call a potato? There are plenty of names to choose from. In fact, there are more than 600 scientific names used around the world for just 4 species of cultivated potato.

Sorting these out has given scientists a bit of a headache, until now. An international team have produced a guide to help people make sense of the plethora of potato names. They have published their paper in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society.
Material from Europe, the Americas, and Russia was gathered together and analysed by scientists at the N.I. Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry, University of Wisconsin and the Natural History Museum. The team found that 600 names corresponded to just 4 species of cultivated potato, Solanum ajanhuiri, Solanum curtilobum, Solanum juzepczukii and Solanum tuberosum.
‘It seems odd that such a commonly known plant should have so many names,’ says Museum botanist Dr Sandra Knapp, one of the authors of the paper. ‘But we discovered that through the years, concepts of how to describe and document the incredible variety in this cultivated plant changed. 'Collections where specimens are kept as evidence of these concepts were key to our working out how these names all fit together.' (...)

The article:
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2011/february/you-say-potato-i-say-solanum-tuberosum94052.html

Basic information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Cultivated_Potato_Database

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Svalbard seed vault to take Peruvian potato samples:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12493970