Transcriptomics in fruit crops: present status and future prospects

Abstract

To meet the emerging challenges, there is a need to evolve improved genotypes in fruit crops having higher productivity, better quality and tolerance to emerging biotic and abiotic stresses. However, genetic improvement of the fruit crops using traditional breeding approaches is very time consuming due to various reasons including their perennial nature, long juvenile phase, higher heterozygosity and complex genetic makeup, self-incompatibility, seedlessness, polyploidy, higher linkage drag etc. The advent of biotechnological tools and omics science especially transcriptomics offers several ways to fulfil the above needs in a short time period. Amongst various fruit crops, transcriptomics has been widely used in crops like apple, banana, citrus, grape etc. to explore the transcriptome changes during different metabolic processes and induced changes, i.e. fruit development and ripening, application of exogenous plant growth regulators or chemicals, response to biotic and abiotic stresses etc. Similarly, the minor fruit crops are needed to be analysed for their transcriptome under various stress conditions. RNA-Seq is a recently developed approach for transcriptome profiling that uses deep-sequencing technologies to provide more precise measurement of levels of transcripts and their isoforms. The present review reports various significant achievements of transcriptome analysis, RNA-Seq and their future prospects in fruit crops.