Breeding for Quality Improvement in Turmeric (Curcuma longa L.): a Review

Turmeric (Curcuma longa L.) is an economically important spice and medicinal plant for production of curcuminoids, oleoresin, essential oil which are used in pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries. Presence of these contents in turmeric determine its quality. Average productivity and quality of turmeric is not satisfactory because of the poor genetic materials and non-availability of quality materials. Conventional clonal selection takes long time and slow progress to achieve the same level of quality improvement than molecular or biotechnological approaches. Use of molecular markers, transcriptome sequencing, real time PCR approaches can be applied as a supplement to conventional methods of breeding through clonal selection and advancing elite genotypes. In this paper, we will discuss in short about the use of different approaches developed for quality improvement in turmeric.