Advances in Plant Breeding Strategies: Vegetable Crops: Volume 8: Bulbs, Roots and Tubers

Contemporary plant breeders rely on conventional and emerging methodologies to provide sustainable food production worldwide. However, human population is growing at the alarming rate, especially in the developing countries, and food availability to feed new mouths could gradually become a serious problem. Agriculture production is negatively impacted by environmental pollution, rapid industrialization, water scarcity, soil erosion of fertile topsoil, limited areas of potential arable land, lack of improvement of local plant types, erosion of genetic diversity, and dependence on just a few major crop species for the world's food supplies. According to FAO, 70% more food must be produced over the next four decades to feed a projected 9 billion people by the year 2050. Only 30 "major crop" plant species provide 95% of the world's food requirements; roughly half are vegetables. Vegetables are an important component of a healthy diet, providing a source of many essential nutrients and vitamins. Breeding programs of these crops have been very much dependent on the ready availability of genetic variation, whether spontaneous or induced. Plant breeders and geneticists are under constant pressure to sustain food production by using innovative breeding strategies and enhancing minor crops that are well adapted to the marginal land and source of nutrition as well as abiotic and biotic stresses. An inherent limitation in traditional breeding, introgression of one or few genes in a cultivar is carried out via backcrossing for several generations that requires extended time.

With the development of new molecular tools, molecular marker-assisted breeding helped rapid introgression of transgene and reduction of linkage drag. The continued development and adaptation of plant biotechnology approaches including genetic engineering, gene editing, molecular markers and genomics has established new tools for the creation, analysis, and manipulation of genetic variation for the development of improved vegetable cultivars. For example, molecular breeding has great potential to become a routine standard practice in improvement of several vegetable crops. However, a multi-disciplinary approach-traditional plant breeding, mutation breeding, plant biotechnology, and molecular biology would be strategically ideal for developing new improved crop varieties worldwide to feed the world under the constraints of environmental stress, the limitation of arable land expansion and genetic resources particularly under the impact of the global climate change. This book highlights the recent progress on the development of plant biotechnology, and molecular tools and their usage in vegetable plant breeding in conjunction with traditional breeding strategies.

The basic concept of this book is to examine the use of both innovative and traditional methods of plant breeding for the development of new vegetable crop varieties under different environmental conditions for sustainable food production, hence the title: Advances in Plant Breeding Strategies. Three volumes of this book were published in 2015, 2016, and 2018 respectively: Volume I, Breeding, Biotechnology and Molecular Tools, Volume II: Agronomic, Abiotic and Biotic Stress Traits, and Volume 3: Fruit Trees. Volume 4 covers advances in breeding strategies for the improvement of individual nut and industrial trees (forthcoming in 2109). Volume 5 focuses on advances in breeding strategies for the improvement of individual cereal and legume crops (forthcoming in 2109). These two new volumes of Advances in Plant Breeding Strategies are subtitled Vol. 6 Vegetable Crops: Bulbs, Roots, Tubers, Flowerheads, Fungi and Volume 7: Vegetable Crops: Fruits, Leaves, Stems. Each volume consists of about 20-24 chapters grouped according to the edible vegetable parts.

Chapters are written by internationally reputable scientists and subjected to review process to assure quality presentation and scientific accuracy. Each chapter starts with an introduction covering related backgrounds and provides in depth discussion of the subject supported with high quality color photos, illustrations and relevant data. The chapter concludes with recommendations for future research directions and a comprehensive list of pertinent references to facilitate further reading.

The book will be an excellent reference source for plant breeders and geneticists engaged in breeding programs involving biotechnology and molecular tools together with the traditional breeding. It is suitable for both advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students specializing in agriculture, biotechnology, and molecular breeding as well as for seed companies.