The Canadian Potato Genome Project (CPGP) ran from 2002 - 2006. The goal of this project was to develop resources in gene discovery in potatoes, to be used by Canadian researchers and their partners. The nearly $4 million project received support from three innovation agents: Genome Canada, the Atlantic Innovation Fund, and the New Brunswick Department of Agriculture and Aquaculture. Several components were also enhanced by investments from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation.

The work was a multi-institutional endeavor involving work teams from six Canadian institutions:

• Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
• BioAtlantech
• Carleton University
• Genome Atlantic
• Nova Scotia Agricultural College
• University of New Brunswick

New resources created by this project include:

• generation of over 101,000 ESTs, with 81,325 sequences contributed to Genbank
• the generation of a 44K 60-mer oligochip microarray
• the largest known population of activation tagged mutant potato lines in the world
• the establishment of bioinformatics for project operations and tools development
• an annotated bibliography on potato/crop genomics
• serveral publications and presentations made by the CPGP team

We wish to thank Shirlyn Coleman, David Wattie and Loretta Mikitzel of the New Brunswick Department of Agriculture and Aquaculture for their help with potato plant growth and storage treatments. We also wish to thank Robin Buell and Jennifer Tsai of TIGR for their assistance in obtaining the TIGR EST data. In addition, we wish to thank David Marshall and Linda Milne of the Scottish Crop Research Institute, for screening our LBCH sequences against their Phytophthora sequence database.