TRANSGENIC APPROACH TOWARDS DEVELOPMENT OF COLD STRESS TOLERANT VEGETABLES FOR HIGH ALTITUDE AREAS

Abstract

High altitude areas are the most different terrains with cold/freezing as one the major problem which reduces the crop duration, affects quality and productivity as most part of the year is covered with unfavourable climatic conditions not suited for crop growth. Despite continued efforts, traditional breeding gave limited success in imparting crop plants with better freezing tolerance due to very little understanding about the mechanisms that regulate chilling and freezing tolerance. The constraints of conventional breeding can be overcome by application of modern biotechnology tools. Various traits such as biotic stress resistance, quality and storage life have been successfully engineered into vegetable crops and some of them have been commercialized to some extent in different countries. Although the progress in commercialization of transgenic vegetable crops has been relatively slow, transgenic vegetables engineered for cold tolerance will contribute significantly to the high altitude agriculture in near future. In this review article we discuss the effect of cold stress on plants, the mechanism developed by plants to cope with cold stress and also mention about different techniques that can be applied for crop improvement for cold stress in particular. This review also focus on different cold related genes identified so far for development of transgenics for cold tolerance in different crops and DRDO, biotechnology initiatives in identification, isolation, characterization and cloning of cold tolerant genes for developing transgenic vegetables for cold tolerance for
high altitude agriculture.