Project Opportunity announced the successful completion of its first field trials in Sweden and Denmark with starch potatoes enhanced through CRISPR-Cas technology to improve resistance to late blight infection.
Seed multiplication activities have also been carried out to produce more and larger seed potatoes. These will enable comprehensive evaluation of the improved late blight resistance events in dedicated field trials planned for 2026.
Project Opportunity brings together 12 European partners across the potato starch value chain who are deeply committed to advancing the approval and responsible use of new breeding techniques in Europe, according to a press release.
“I am honestly proud that we have managed to conduct the improvement via NGT in such an engaged group of companies via this cooperation,” said Hans Berggren, secretary of Opportunity. “Only last year we created the first seedlings and cultivated them in greenhouse to produce seed-tubers and have now grown these so-called mini-tubers therefrom in field during the 2025 growing season.
Berggren says he is highly optimistic that by 2026 and beyond, stakeholders will be able to witness firsthand the power of NGTs in the field through enhanced potato genotypes with strong tolerance to severe plant diseases such as late blight. He adds that the project has already demonstrated how rapidly this technology can help adapt potatoes to urgent and evolving environmental challenges.
Sjefke Allefs, potato breeder at Agrico (a Project Opportunity partner), explains that it will take several more years to verify the results and identify the single event that provides the optimal increase in late blight tolerance, ultimately contributing to more sustainable starch potato cultivation.
Agrico provided Kuras, a widely used starch potato variety, which has now been successfully improved through NGTs within the Project Opportunity initiative.
