ABSTRACT
Vegetable crops are crucial for ensuring food as well as nutritional security. Enormous diversity in vegetable crops provides almost all the nutritional components required for food. For most of the agrarian countries like India, vegetables share a major section of export. Being the more remunerative, vegetable crops directly contribute to farmers’ economic growth and welfare. The importance of vegetables in all these aspects warrants the continuous improvement of vegetable crops in terms of yield and quality. However, the stress imposed by several factors, including biotic, abiotic and other manmade factors, results in the tremendous reduction in yield and quality depending on the severity of stress, which is a major challenge for nutritional security. Breeding for resistance to different diseases and insects or abiotic stresses is one of the most important aims of breeders in vegetable improvement programmes. However, in traditional breeding, source of desirable genes becomes a limitation in the number of crops, and therefore, alternative strategies are always looked upon by breeders. Recent developments in the field of biotechnology, including low-cost sequencing technologies, speed breeding and genome editing, have catalysed the crop improvement programmes. Most recent tools based on CRISPR/Cas have revolutionized the process of genome editing and is the most widely used technique today. It has been utilized in numerous vegetable crops for modifying different traits. This chapter focuses on the genome editing for the improvement of vegetable crops. It will provide the current status of genome editing and possible future application in vegetables.
