Breeding Approaches for Quality Improvement in Fruit Crops: Strategies and Achievements

Abstract

As we know that fruit plays important role in the daily human diet for healthy living and is also a commercial commodity in trade and processing industries. The primary factor that customers use to determine whether or not a fruit is acceptable is its quality like appearance, shape, size, colour and taste, etc. Success in a breeding program depends upon the overall acceptability of fruit quality because most of the developed varieties having desired traits like resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses could not be commercialized and are not in commercial cultivation owing to their poor-quality traits. Therefore, the development of cultivars with desirable quality attributes in fruit crops is challenging. Quality improvement in fruit crops is restricted by several factors such as long juvenility, tall stature, environmental stress and high heterozygosity. Quality traits in fruit crops are polygenic and governed by many genes which makesit difficult to improve particular desirable traits. Many attempts have been made to enhance the qualitative characteristics of annual crops, although perennial fruit crops neatly overlook this issue. Accordingly, the use of both combined conventional and modern breeding techniques could in overcoming these problems. Biotechnological and molecular approaches like marker-assisted selection, transgenics, genomic editing, genomics cis-genics and candidate gene offer precision and reliability to reduce the breeding cycle and are also advantageous when dealing with tedious fruit crops. The challenges with fruit breeding and the state of various breeding techniques for enhancing fruit quality in fruit trees will be the main topics of this review.