And, they have solved more than a viral problem. By cloning seeds, they also have overcome the vegetable's tendency to mutate and become an unpredictable, and often unsellable, product. You'll get different flesh colors or different skin colors. It's kind of a gamble. They have this susceptibility because they propagate vegetatively, not sexually, and because of their genetic diversity.
Sweet potatoes have an enormous genome, containing six copies of each chromosome.
In comparison, humans only have two copies. The project was started in 1989, and this is the first year that the seeds have qualified for certification by the North Carolina Seed Foundation Producers Inc., an industry organization that certifies the health and purity of seed stock. N.C. In ordinary propagation sweet potatoes are cultivated from sprouts growing out of seed roots, which are actual potatoes, in the ground. One seed root is parent to numerous sprouts. If the seed root sweet potato is the wrong color or shape or is diseased, the mutation or virus is then multiplied by the number of plants sprouting from it.