Molecular Breeding for Fruit Quality

Dear Colleagues,

Fruits are an essential part of human diet, providing significant amounts of vitamins, antioxidants, minerals, fibers, and numerous health benefit compounds. There is a general agreement that a diet low in fruits and vegetables predisposes to numerous health problems, from cardiovascular diseases to increased rates of cancer. Despite these benefits, large groups of people in most parts of the world have a restricted access to high-quality fruits, mainly due to their elevated production and storage costs. To exacerbate this problem, agriculture–economic models predict that global climate change will lead to reduced food and vegetable availability in the following years, not only in low-income countries but also in some richer regions. In this scenario of growing world population and reduced fruit availability, increasing the production of high-quality fruits is of critical importance for human health.

Traditionally, most breeding efforts have been devoted to increasing fruit size and yield, disregarding other quality parameters, such as sensory attributes or nutritional content. Current production practices favoring early fruit harvesting and some postharvest strategies can also contribute to reducing overall fruit quality. Novel approaches are needed to deal with the future challenges of fruit production, improving fruit organoleptic properties and nutritional value, and also to be able to accommodate fruit industry with consumer preferences. Modern breeding techniques such as genetic engineering, gene edition or marker-assisted selection will be especially useful to achieve this goal.

In this Special Issue, articles (original research papers, perspectives, hypotheses, opinions, reviews, modeling approaches and methods) that focus on molecular fruit breeding at all levels, including physiology, biochemistry, genetics, genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics approaches, are welcome.

Dr. José A. Mercado
Dr. Sara Posé
Guest Editors

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• fleshy fruits
• fruit biotechnology
• fruit breeding
• fruit quality
• fruit metabolism
• fruit nutritional composition