Department of Molecular Biology and Genetic Engineering, College of Biotechnology, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel University of Agriculture and Technology, Meerut-250 110, U.P.
Vegetables are grown world-wide and makeup a major portion of the diet of human in many parts of the world. These are essential for well balanced diet. Their rising consumption world-wide reflecting the consumers ’increased income and awareness of the nutritional benefits. Genetic engineering helps in improving the value of crop plants by enabling the breeders to incorporate desired transgenes into the elite cultivars of the crops. Transgenic cultivars can make important contribution to sustainable vegetable production by overcoming the yeild and quality limiting factors. Increasing interests of both scientists and consumers in this area has fuelled the research for developing potential transgenic vegetable crops. More than 100-fold increase in the global hectarage of biotech crops from 1.7 million hectares in 1996 to181.5 million hectares in 2014, reveales that biotech crops are the fastest adopted crop technology in recent times. This impressive adoption rate speaks for itself, in terms of its sustainability, resilience and the significant benefits it delivers to both small and large farmers as well as consumers. In this context the status of transgenic vegetable crops and their future prospects were discussed in this review.
Transgenic vegetables, Bt brinjal, Flavr Savr tomato
