ABSTRACT
Solanaceae family contains major vegetable crop plants such as Capsicum, tomato, potato, and eggplant. Although conventional breeding has achieved considerable success in breeding these crops, however, the advancement of molecular genetics and genomics techniques have greatly supplemented the development of high yielding, rich in nutrients, tolerant to biotic and abiotic stress crop varieties in shorter time periods. Genomic selection (GS) is one of the high throughput emerging techniques of plant breeding that has been successfully applied for the selection of several complex traits in many crop plants. In Solanaceae, GS has been conducted for traits such as fruit size, disease resistance and other traits mostly in tomato. However, in case of other Solanaceae crops like Capsicum, eggplant, and potato there is very limited information on GS and therefore needs attention. In this chapter, an attempt has been made to compile the genomic resources 112available on Solanaceae crop plants which can be utilized for GS and listed limited available study reports on GS on those crop plants. Further, we explored methodologies and strategies of GS that are being applied in different crops which can also be adopted towards improvement of Solanaceae. Furthermore, advantages and future scope of adopting GS for the development of better varieties in Solanaceae crops has been discussed.
