Genetic approaches have been utilized extensively for crop improvement, and biotechnology has expanded the tools available to geneticists and breeders. Transgenic technologies offer many scientific advantages in breeding for improved horticultural crops’ quality and performance. However, in contrast to the increasing global adoption of transgenic/biotech field crops, biotechnology has had limited commercial success to date in horticultural crops, including fruits, vegetables, flowers and landscape plants. A very few genetically engineered horticultural crops have been released to farmers, either in the United States or overseas. Though, various traits that would be desired by growers and consumers of horticultural crops, including novel genetic methods for disease and insect pest protection, weed control, longer-lived flowers and slower-growing grass, etc have been developed and tested without as yet achieving commercialization. The number of field trials of biotech horticultural crops has recently dwindled to only a handful in fruits and vegetables. As a consequence of the disappointing past commercial results and current market outlook, many horticultural seed and nursery companies are reducing their investments in research involving genetic engineering. After more than two decades of intensive research, the market for transgenic crops is still dominated by applications of just a handful of methods and genes. In this paper, major challenges being faced by the horticultural biotechnology have been discussed.
Transgenic crops, Horticultural biotechnology, transgenics commercialization, hurdles, biosafety regulations
