Breeding of Vegetable, Spice and Tuber Crops

Role in crop improvement programme

• Recurrent selection has been used successfully in corn, sweet clover bromegrass,strawberries and onion.
• Genetic patterns can be modified by control of light and heat. Since Borthwick and Hendrikes discovered phtyochorme in 1952, numerous studies have shown that controlled lighting and chemical treatment can modify flowering and fruiting in plants.
• This has not been tested in autogamous vegetable crops because of difficulties of producing enough seed for testing and necessary intercrossings in each cycle.
• Phenotypic recurrent selection has been tested in an elegant study in cantaloupe (muskmelon) by Andrus and Bohn (1967).
• Nine cycles of mass selection were practised in a heterozygous base population using an index representing 16 fruit characters.