The potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is a major world food crop, next in production only to maize, rice and wheat. Short duration and wide flexibility in planting and harvesting time are potato’s other valuable traits that help adjusting this crop in various intensive-cropping systems without putting much pressure on scarce land and water resources. In the Asia-Pacific region, potato is grown on about 7.3 million hectares, producing about 121.7 million tonnes of potatoes with an average productivity of 16.49 t/ha. The contribution of the Asia-Pacific region to the world area and production of potato is 39.3% and 37.7%, respectively.However, potato cultivation in the region is unevenly distributed with China and India alone
accounting for about 79% area as well as production.
Shortage of good quality seed has been recognized as the single most important factor limiting potato production in the developing countries. Fortunately, potato has been an early beneficiary of advances in conventional and modern biotechnologies resulting in their use for solving practical problems relating to potato cultivation and improvement. Meristem culture was possibly the first biotechnological approach used to eliminate viruses from systemically infected potato clones. Over the years, this technique has been successfully combined with micropropagation to produce disease-free potato seed.
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