Investigation of Carotenoid Content in the Color Change of Potato Mutant Produced by Gamma Irradiation

Potato (solanum tubrusum) is the fourth staple food after rice, wheat and corn. It is the most important tuberous crop. Potato color flesh is one of the most important parameters in food industry and marketability. The flesh color of the tetraploid cultivars range from white to cream and yellow to dark yellow. There are a few cultivars with red or blue/pink flesh color. Based on mutant clones containing superior quantitative and qualitative traits and flesh color change in Caesar potato variety, this research was carried out with the aim of determination of the reason of color flesh change in Caesar mutant.

Mutant and parent (Caesar) clone were cultivated in research farm of Ardabil Agriculture Research Center in 1397. Sampling was done in 4 replications for each clone. Changes in total carotenoid and its components were performed by spectroscopy-UV and HPLC-chromatography, respectively.

Carotenoid content in mutant clone was 319.54(µg/100 FW) and in parent clone was 246.36 (µg/100 FW). This result showed that content of total carotenoid in mutant was 1.3 times the carotenoid content of the parent. HPLC results showed that Lutein content was increased in mutant in comparison to parent, whereas, violaxantin was higher in parent that mutant clone.

Based on our results total carotenoid content along with lutein play an important role in potato color flesh change. Our finding is in accordance with results of other researches that showed that flesh color change from cream (parent) to yellow (mutant) was affected by total carotenoid content generally and lutein specifically.