Li Manman , Jianli Zhong

Hainan Institute of Biotechnology, Haikou, 570206, Hainan, China
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Plant Breeding, 2025, Vol. 16, No. 6   
Received: 08 Oct., 2025    Accepted: 13 Nov., 2025    Published: 25 Nov., 2025

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Global climate change has intensified the threat of drought to agriculture. Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas), which were once regarded as "drought-tolerant and easy-to-grow" crops, have also begun to fail in some areas. To ensure its stable production in the future, it is necessary to find new varieties that can both resist drought and achieve high yields. Starting from this reality, this study sorted out the main ideas of drought-resistant breeding of sweet potatoes and also attempted to build a more practical process. Let's start with the visible phenotypes, such as which sweet potatoes can still have plump leaves, deep root systems and little yield loss during drought. Indicators like survival rate, relative moisture content and leaf temperature, which seem simple, are actually the most direct basis for judging drought resistance. Next, let's return to the genetic level to explore why sweet potatoes are drought-tolerant - their genome is inherently complex and hexaploid. It is not just one or two genes that control drought resistance, but a complete regulatory network. Traditional breeding, which relies on field screening, is often much slower, while molecular marker technology enables us to identify useful gene loci more quickly. We also conducted an association analysis in combination with genomic data, identifying QTLS related to drought resistance from a vast number of markers, and then evaluated the germplasm performance using a comprehensive model to pick out the materials that are truly worthy of being used as parents. Finally, we attempted to use this information to design hybrid combinations and found that the combination guided by molecular markers could indeed significantly improve the breeding efficiency, especially in the early generation when good seedlings could be screened out. Overall, this "phenotypic + molecular" combined approach is faster and more accurate than traditional methods, and it also makes drought-resistant breeding of asexually propagated crops like sweet potatoes more feasible.

Sweet potato; Drought stress; Molecular marker-assisted selection; Genetic diversity; Hybrid breeding