Approaches for Vegetable and Fruit Quality Trait Improvement

Abstract

Improving food quality traits has become a major goal of fruit and vegetable breeding due to the increasing public awareness of nutraceutical compounds to human nutrition and health. During domestication and breeding of modern varieties, many traits were left behind in the wild and in the primitive and old varieties. Thus, natural variation in such exotic germplasm of fruits and vegetables provides rich sources for discovery of novel genetic elements to improve nutritional quality and health-promoting properties of food crops. Advanced ‘omics’ tools including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and epigenomics facilitate the hunting of important genes that control quality traits of fruits and vegetables. Plant biotechnology enables the utilization of those novel discovered genetic elements to breed new varieties of agricultural crops with value-added traits.