Omics technologies and breeding of horticultural crops

With the continuing climate change–driven environmental impact, horticulture sector is facing the pressure of achieving sustainable yield and quality of produce in several horticultural plants. Conventional and biotechnological tools including mutagenesis and molecular markers have contributed to improvement of useful traits such as new plant type, shelf- life, floral morphology and quality, yield besides stress tolerance of fruit crops, vegetables, ornamental, medicinal, and aromatic plants. Despite such progress, there is a greater need to utilize the available genomic and transcriptomic resources and omics knowledge base in horticultural crops to discover new, novel genes and regulators for important traits, dissect known and unknown metabolic pathways, and manipulate using genetic and epigenetic regulatory switches. New genomics advances are expected to augment breeding efforts through genome-wide markers and identifying breeding value of candidate genotypes for selection. The advent of omics technologies is poised to unravel at genome, proteome, and metabolome levels, the trait complexities of plant response to environmental extremities, diseases and pests, nutritional deficiencies, besides developing new plant types. This article will outline different applications of omics technologies in horticultural plants and discuss opportunities for their improvement.