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WWW.POTATOGROWER.COM 29 GENTLE: Separates without damaging peaches, apples, mushrooms and fresh tomatoes. ACCURATE: Precisely grades grape tomatoes, cherries, nuts, and small berries, maintaining that accuracy for larger products including cantaloupes and pineapple. FAST: Thirteen standard models custom-designed to meet your needs sort from 1000 lb/hr to 100,000 lb/hr. SIMPLE: Effective but simple design provides a rugged, low cost, low maintenance machine at a high value to our customers. It can even be used in the field! VERSATILE: Specialized rollers allow for the accurate sizing of round products (potatoes, onions and citrus), long products (carrots, russets, and cucumbers), and irregular products (bell peppers, jalapenos, and garlic). Proven in use for: Round Potatoes, Russets, Goldrush, Reds, Sweet Potatoes, Fingerlings, and more. KERIAN MACHINES INC. 1709 Hwy 81 S PO Box 311 Grafton, ND 58237 Phone 701-352-0480 Fax 701-352-3776 Website: www.kerian.com Email: sales@kerian.com 158542KerMac13.indd 1 1/7/16 1:27 PM The next job was to isolate the calcium trait. Jansky and her colleagues interbred the high- and low-calcium potatoes. The resulting generations showed a molecular marker—a pattern in the plant's natural DNA. This pattern led researchers to the plant's calcium trait. "Finding this marker will allow us— and other breeding programs—to make faster progress in breeding potato plants with high tuber calcium content," says Jansky. "This has been difficult and time- consuming in the past. You have to grow all the populations, harvest tubers, and then analyze the tubers for the trait you are looking at—in this case tuber calcium levels. And that's a long, laborious process." A typical breeding program grows and assesses up to 100,000 seedlings every year. It takes between 10 and 15 years to release a particular variety of crop plant. However, the process simplifies with known molecular markers. "We can collect DNA from seedlings and check for these molecular markers," says Yong Suk Chung, the first author of this study. "If you have the marker present, then you select those seedlings and save a tremendous amount of time and labor." Jansky's research was published in the journal Crop Science in January 2016. "Whenever we have looked for any trait in wild potato species, we have been able to fi nd it," says researcher Shelley Jansky.