Breeding Perennial Fruit Crops for Quality Improvement

Fruits play a crucial role in human diets and as a commercial commodity in trade. The consumers have considered fruit quality as the most important criteria that decides its acceptability. Fruit quality-based overall acceptability determines the success of any breeding programme, as a number of improved varieties with desired traits including resistance to stresses could not be popularized due to their poor quality fruits. However, breeding for quality improvement in perennial fruit crops is hampered by a number of limitations including large size of the plant, long juvenile phase and environmental problems (e.g. fruit drops due to natural calamities). Besides, fruit quality is a polygenic trait, which is quantitatively inherited and thus making breeding programme complicated in quality improvement of fruit crops. Several attempts have been made to improve the quality characters in annual staple crops, however this aspect is conveniently ignored in case of perennial fruit crops. A balanced approach combining conventional and non-conventional breeding techniques could help in addressing this issue. The biotechnological approaches provide precision, reliability and are considered to reduce the breeding cycle in long duration crops. Efficacy of approaches like marker assisted selection, candidate gene, genomics, trangenics, cisgenics has shown to be advantageous when dealing with cumbersome crops. This review would focus on problems in fruit breeding and present status of different breeding approaches for fruit quality improvement in fruit trees.