The plastome sequence of the European cultivated potato, Solanum tuberosum subsp. tuberosum(tbr, GenBank accession no. DQ386163), was compared with that of S. bulbocastanum, a wild potato relative (blb, GenBank accession no. DQ347958), in order to characterize the degree and type of variability in different genomic regions, and develop molecular markers relevant to genetics, breeding and biotechnology of potato. One hundred forty-two and 251 PICs (Potentially Informative Characters) were found in coding and non-coding sequences (NCSs), respectively. Further, while variation in coding regions was almost exclusively due to nucleotide substitutions, 25% of PICs in NCSs of tbr and blb were due to indels, most of them mononucleotide or longer tandem repeats (micro and minisatellites). Four intergenic regions were selected for further analyses in other 16 tuber-bearing Solanum species. The rps16-trnQUUGgene spacer was found to be the most variable, forty-six PICs in this region distinguishing 18 haplotypes. Analysis of haplotype relationships, based on variability in the four intergenic regions, confirmed that the most primitive species from Central America were the most distant to S. tuberosum. Finally, polymorphic sites in the same regions were used to develop a set of CAPS (Cleaved Amplified Polymorphic Sequences) markers for species/cytoplasm identification in Solanum spp.
