Inheritance Pattern and improvement of Solanaceous Vegetables Crops: A Review

Solanaceous vegetables play a significant role in human nutrition especially as sources of vitamins like vitamin A, C, E, thiamine, niacin, pyridoxine, folacin, minerals and dietary fiber. Besides supplying many nutrients, vegetables provide variety to the diet and make the food attractive by their colour, texture and flavor. They termed as Protective Foods as they are rich in minerals, vitamins and phytonutrients. Traditionally, crop improvement programmers have been focused on yield and disease resistance with limited emphasis on nutritional attributes. However, major antioxidants supplying from solanaceous vegetables depend upon their acceptance by the consumers. Nutritional attributes is an essential component of economic yield as it determines the suitability of plant product for various uses and therefore, it is an integral part of plant breeding. In tomato, total soluble solids, acidity, ascorbic acid, carotenoids, lycopene, reducing sugar and dry matter content inherited Non-additive and over-dominance. This group includes tomato, brinjal, chilli, sweet pepper and potato are all time favorite vegetables. Vitamins, Minerals, Phyto-nutrients, Antioxidants, Flavanoids, Carbohydrates, Proteins and Lipids are important nutritional attribute in solanaceous vegetables. In tomato and chilli, ascorbic acid constitute an important nutritional attribute and in these vegetables emphasis should be focused on breeding for ascorbic acid content and other nutritional attribute. In chilli cultivars that AC-5881 had the highest level of antioxidant followed BCC-62 and AC 465. These cultivars can likely be used as genetic material in future breeding programme. In brinjal, as both additive and non additive genetic component were involved in inheritance of anthocyanin, for improvement of this character the reciprocal recurrent selection seems to be effective.