The strange-but-true origin story of the humble potato

The potato: Mash it, bake it, fry it … No matter how you slice it, the potato is the very manifestation of all that is ordinary.

And yet the domesticated potato and all of its wild relatives have long harbored a genetic mystery. "We didn't know where the whole potato lineage came from," says Sandy Knapp , a botanist at the Natural History Museum in London.

Scientists have known that potatoes are most closely related to two groups of plants — the tomatoes and a cluster of three species called Etuberosum. "They're very cute," says Knapp. "They've got purple flowers. They're really lovely."

But here was the conundrum: Certain genes suggested that potatoes were more closely related to tomatoes, while other genes gave the impression that potatoes and Etuberosum had the closer relationshi