Breeding and genomic investigations for quality and nutraceutical traits in vegetable crops-a review

Abstract

Globally, micronutrient malnutrition is a big burden in pubic health spread across the geopolitical regions and socio-economic strata. The efforts for challenging this ‘hidden hunger’ are dietary diversity, food supplementation, food fortification and biofortification of common food crops. Human body requires nearly 49 different dietary elements and maintaining their regular intake seems to more effective and sustainable through dietary diversity and biofortified crops, however, their accessibility and affordability in continuum remain issues. For this, vegetable crops have great promise to serve for dietary needs because these crops represent a group of more than thousand plants spread all across world and constituent of regular diets. Although, accounted vegetable production in the world is 1088.8 million tonnes but huge numbers of minor vegetables also serve for dietary minerals in poor or rural communities inhabiting in vulnerable regions. Vegetables are bulky in nature but they are the key sources of health protective dietary constituents such as minerals, vitamins and antioxidants in human diet. Their intake also provides dietary elements and antioxidants to protect body from various immune-related diseases by acting against free radicals. The complex matrix of various constituents and minerals influence consumer preference and absorption pattern also. However, the focus on breeding for yield traits affected quality attributes seriously, hence it become essential to breed varieties having high yield and better quality traits. For this, molecular tools and genome sequencing techniques showed effectiveness to speed up the classical breeding methods for these traits of complex pathways. Besides, genome editing techniques such as transgenics, RNA interference and CRISPR/cas have great prospect in vegetables for enriching health beneficial constituents and also for removal of antinutritional factors. The present review reports significant achievements from attempts on understanding genetic of quality traits and breeding vegetables for quality, nutraceutical, pharmaceutical and other industrial traits.