Vol. 11, Issue 4 (2022)

Author(s):
Mukesh Shivran, Uttam Shivran and Narendra Singh

Abstract:
Fruits are an important part of human diets and consumption of adequate quantity of fruits as well as foods enriched in nutraceuticals and bioactive compounds is considered necessary for a healthy human life. The first step in plant breeding is to identify suitable genotypes having the desired genes among existing genotypes and to create one if it is not present in nature.Breeding improvement in perennial fruit crops is affected by a number of limitations like, long juvenile phase, heterozygosity, large size of the plant, sterility and environmental problems like flower and fruit drops. Breeding in fruit crops is essential requirement for enhance the quality fruit production and decrease the incidence of biotic and abiotic stress. However,improvement of perennial fruit crops is mainly depending on traditional approaches of introduction, selection, mutation and hybridization by using the cultivated genotypes of a species. Biotechnological approaches give precision and they are thought to shorten the breeding cycle in fruit crops. Recently biotechnology techniques have been employed including in-vitro propagation, embryo rescue, recombinant DNA technology, protoplast fusion, somatic hybrid, somaclonal variation, transgenics and marker-assisted selection. In this article, we will discuss general conventional and non-conventional approaches in breeding for improvement of fruit crops.