Recent Advances in Fruit Species Transformation

Rapid increase of human population together with global climate variability resulted in increased demand of plant based food and energy sources (Varshney et al., 2011). Fruits and nuts have essential role to enhance quality of humankind life since a diet based on cereal grains, root and tuber crops, and legumes is generally lacked a wide range of products such as fiber, vitamin, provitamins or other micronutrients and compounds exist in fruit and nut species (Heslop-Harrison, 2005). According to last FAOSTAT statistics, totally about 594.5 million t fruit crops (except melons) were produced in the world in 2009 (http://faostat.fao.org). Because an increase demand exists in global food production, many economically important fruit crops production need to be improved, however, conventional breeding is still limited due to genetic restrictions (high heterozygosity and polyploidy), long juvenile periods, self-incompatibility, resources restricted to parental genome and exposed to sexual combination (Akhond & Machray, 2009; Malnoy et al., 2010; Petri et al., 2011). Thus, there is an urgent need for the biotechnology-assisted crop improvement, which ultimately aimed to obtain novel plant traits (Petri & Burgos, 2005).