الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The potato (Solanum tuberosum) is a starchy, tuberous cropof the Solanaceae family. It is considered one of the most
important vegetable crops inEgyptaswell as, all over the worldwhere it is the world’s fourth-largest food crop, following rice,wheat and maize (Hawkes, 1994). As one of the major
agricultural crops, the cultivated potato is consumed each day bymillions of people fromdiverseculturalbackgrounds. Potatoes
were introduced outside the Andes region four centuries ago,andhavebecome an integral part of much of the world’s cuisine.However, the local importance of potato is extremely variable and
rapidly changing from land to other. It remains an essential cropin Europe (especially eastern and central Europe), where percapita production is still the highest in the world, but the mostrapid expansion over the past few decades has occurred insouthern and eastern Asia. China is now the world’s largestpotato-producing country and nearly a third of the world’spotatoes are harvested in China and India (FAO 2009ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/011 /i0500/i0500e02.pdf”). TheUnited Nations FAO reports that the world production of potatoesin 2009 was 330 million tonesFAOSTAT,2011http://faostate.fao.org.site/567/desctpdefault.aspx”). In Egypt