I International Symposium on Tropical Plant Breeding

Perennial crop breeding is one of the most important but difficult to achieve. Due to the high heterozygosity and the long duration that it takes for improvement, it is a difficult material to handle. The assessment of genetic diversity of fruit crops is an important step in breeding since a diverse range of plant material including landraces; modern cultivars, crop wild relatives and other wild species are available as the starting material. In recent times conventional breeding coupled with the use of biotechnological tools has helped in achieving desirable results. Marker assisted selections are becoming a handy tool in the improvement programs everywhere. Creation of variability, the basic platform on which the breeding program is taken up has become easy with mutagenic, genomics and gene expression studies. New vistas are getting opened up due to this progress. Much work needs to be done in tropical fruit crops, keeping the earlier studies as the basis. This would help the researchers everywhere engaged in fruit breeding to chalk out a new course for the improvement programs. This ultimately would result in the development of varieties with better quality, tolerant to biotic and abiotic stresses.