Fruit Breeding and Breeding

Dear Colleagues,

Fruits are an excellent source of essential vitamins and minerals, and they are high in fiber. Fruits also provide a wide range of health-boosting antioxidants, including flavonoids. Fruit breeding, the genetic improvement of fruit crops, has an ancient tradition that shares links with the domestication process. Millennial genetic improvement has been achieved by grower selection, first from natural seedling populations and then from seedlings that occurred naturally in grower fields with desirable genotypes fixed by vegetative propagation. In the middle of the 19th century, hybridization between elite genotypes was achieved, followed by the selection of segregating progeny. Conventional fruit breeding is based on the continuous selection of superior phenotypes from genetically variable populations, using cycles of hybridization and selection and special techniques, such as mutation induction, interspecific hybridization, and backcross breeding. Recently, biotechnology techniques have been employed, including in vitro propagation, embryo rescue, protoplast fusion, marker-assisted selection, and transgenesis. The Special Issue ‘Fruit Breeding and Breeding’ aims to highlight the latest improved methods and techniques used to investigate the research questions in genetic studies on fruit breeding in the current genomic era. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

Genetic studies on classical and modern fruit breeding;

• In vitro propagation;
• Transgenesis;
• Breeding methods;
• General and specific breeding;
• Genomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics;
• Population genetics, domestication, adaptation and selection;
• Marker-assisted selection;
• Mutagenesis in fruit breeding, etc.;
• Functional foods;
• Pre-breeding studies.

This research topic includes technologies and up-to-date methods that help to advance science.

Prof. Dr. Nesibe Ebru Kafkas
Dr. Luca Mazzoni
Guest Editors

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• fruits
• breeding methods
• traditional and modern breeding
• domestication of fruits
• molecular characterization
• marker-assisted selection
• pre-breeding studies