Vegetable Breeding – Principles and Practices

The first part of this book Principles of Vegetable Breeding has been structured with 17 chapters detailing history of vegetable breeding, origin and domestication, reproductive features and pollination control mechanisms, general breeding methods for sexually and asexually propagated crops, breeding for high temperature stress, disease resistance and product quality, heterosis breeding, mutation breeding, breeding through alteration of ploidy, ideotype breeding, procedure for release of a variety, intellectual property rights and biotechnological approaches for vegetable breeding. The second part Practices of Vegetable Breeding has been framed on the details of 24 vegetable crops under all the reproductive feature group pertaining to their origin, taxonomy, distribution, crop botany and floral biology, reproductive behaviour, genetics of important traits with published gene list, breeding objective, germplasm resource, breeding methods and breeding achievement highlighting the released varieties of the public sector. Important references have been provided at the end of each chapter which will be helpful for the post graduate and doctoral level students.

This book follows the syllabi prescribed by ICAR for B.Sc. Hons. (Ag.), B.Sc. Hons. (Hort.), M.Sc (Ag.), M.Sc (Hort.) and Doctoral degree programmes in Vegetable Science particularly Genetics and Breeding of vegetable crops. Authors long experience acquired through teaching and research on different aspects of vegetable breeding was put together to structure this book.