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There is an increase in the demand of fruits and vegetables as the population is increasing exponentially. In order to produce 360 mt of horticultural produce from current level of 150 mt by 2020, careful planning and application of newer tools of genetic engineering and biotechnology is required. Conventional plant breeding techniques have made considerable progress in development of improved varieties but it is not able to keep the pace with increasing demand for vegetables and fruits. Thus, there is a need to integrate biotechnology and genetic engineering to the conventional programs to speed up the crop and yield improvement of the horticultural crops by providing new varieties of plants and planting material, more efficient and selective pesticides and improved fertilizers. Developed countries have already adopted this structure of research and have already established many genetically modified crops in the market. Modern biotechnology encompasses broad areas of biology from utilization of living organisms or substances from those organisms to make or modify a product, to improve plant or animal or to develop micro-organisms for specific use. The major areas of biotechnology which can be adopted for crop and yield improvement of horticultural crops are:

I.  Tissue Culture:

One of the widest applications of biotechnology has been in the area of tissue culture and micro propagation in particular. It is one of the most widely used techniques for rapid asexual in vitro propagation. This technique is economical in time and space affords greater output and provides disease free and elite propagules.  It also facilitates safer and quarantined movements of germplasm across nations.  When the traditional methods are unable to meet the demand for propagation material this technique can produce millions of uniformly flowering and yielding plants.  Micropropagation of almost all the fruit crops and vegetables is possible now.  Production of virus free planting material using meristem culture has been made possible in many horticultural crops.  Embryo rescue is another area where plant breeders are able to rescue their crosses which would otherwise abort.  Culture of excised embryos of suitable stages of development can circumvent problems encountered in post zygotic incompatibility.  This technique is highly significant in intractable and long duration horticultural species.  Many of the dry land legume species have been successfully regenerated from cotyledons, hypocotyls, leaf, ovary, protoplast, petiole root, anthers, etc., Haploid generation through anther/pollen culture is recognized as another important area in crop improvement.  It is useful in being rapid and economically feasible.  Complete homozygosity of the offspring helps in phenotype selection for quantitative characters and particularly for qualitatively inherited characters making breeding much easier successful isolation, culture and fusion of plant protoplasts has been very useful in transferring cytoplasmic male sterility for obtaining hybrid vigour through mitochondrial recombination and for genetic transformation in plants.

Rice genetics III, proceedings of the Third International Rice Genetics Symposium, Manila, Philippines, 16-20 Oct 1995

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