Current trends in the genetic engineering of vegetable crops

Vegetables play an important role in human nutrition and health. Cultivation of vegetable crops is an integral part of the agricultural economy of many developing countries. Vegetable crop productivity and quality are seriously affected by several biotic and abiotic stresses, which destabilize rural economies in many countries. Moreover, absence of proper post-harvest storage and processing facilities leads to qualitative and quantitative losses. In the past four decades, conventional breeding has contributed significantly for the improvement of vegetable yields, quality, post-harvest life, and resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses. However, there are many constraints in conventional breeding, which can only be overcome by advancements made in modern biology. In the last decade various traits such as biotic stress resistance, quality and storage life have been successfully engineered into vegetable crops and some of them have been commercialized. In recent years significant progress has been made to manipulate vegetable crops for abiotic stress tolerance, quality improvement and pharmaceutical and industrial applications. Although the progress in commercialization of transgenic vegetable crops has been relatively slow, transgenic vegetables engineered for nutraceutical and pharmaceutical use will contribute significantly to the value added agriculture in near future.