''Solanum brevicaule'' is a

tuber Tubers are a type of enlarged structure that plants use as storage organs for nutrients, derived from stems or roots. Tubers help plants perennate (survive winter or dry months), provide energy and nutrients, and are a means of asexual reproduc ...

ous

perennial plant In horticulture, the term perennial (''wikt:per-#Prefix, per-'' + ''wikt:-ennial#Suffix, -ennial'', "through the year") is used to differentiate a plant from shorter-lived annual plant, annuals and biennial plant, biennials. It has thus been d ...

of the family

Solanaceae Solanaceae (), commonly known as the nightshades, is a family of flowering plants in the order Solanales. It contains approximately 2,700 species, several of which are used as agricultural crops, medicinal plants, and ornamental plants. Many me ...

. The species is native to

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...

(

Argentina Argentina, officially the Argentine Republic, is a country in the southern half of South America. It covers an area of , making it the List of South American countries by area, second-largest country in South America after Brazil, the fourt ...

Bolivia Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia, is a landlocked country located in central South America. The country features diverse geography, including vast Amazonian plains, tropical lowlands, mountains, the Gran Chaco Province, w ...

, and

Peru Peru, officially the Republic of Peru, is a country in western South America. It is bordered in the north by Ecuador and Colombia, in the east by Brazil, in the southeast by Bolivia, in the south by Chile, and in the south and west by the Pac ...

). It is related to the

potato The potato () is a starchy tuberous vegetable native to the Americas that is consumed as a staple food in many parts of the world. Potatoes are underground stem tubers of the plant ''Solanum tuberosum'', a perennial in the nightshade famil ...

, but unlike the potato which is tetraploid, it has several levels of

ploidy Ploidy () is the number of complete sets of chromosomes in a cell, and hence the number of possible alleles for autosomal and pseudoautosomal genes. Here ''sets of chromosomes'' refers to the number of maternal and paternal chromosome copies, ...

: diploid, tetraploid, and hexaploid. This species gives its name to the "''Solanum brevicaule'' complex" which includes about twenty species of morphologically close wild potato species distributed between central Peru and northern Argentina, and are considered by some taxonomists to be the ancestors of the traditional varieties of potatoes grown in the Andean regions.

References

* Edible Solanaceae brevicaule Taxa named by Friedrich August Georg Bitter Plants described in 1912 {{Solanales-stub