Advances in Improvement of Pumpkin and Squashes

Pumpkins and squashes which belong to genus Cucurbita are among the four important genera of Cucurbitaceae family, with widest adaptation from temperate to tropics. These are mainly cultivated for fruits (immature and mature) and seeds for snacks and oil. The diversity in fruit colour, size and shape, leaf morphology, plant stature, shelf life and regular changing food pattern of the society has steered the breeders to evolve and improve cultivars as per demand. The emergence of new biotypes, strains, races of insect-pests and pathogens, abiotic stresses due to climate change and demand for nutritious food has reoriented breeding objectives as well as the breeding methods to ascertain the future demands. Conventional breeding alone can no longer sustain the global demand with the increasing population, declining resources (land, water) and the apparent plateauing of the yield curves. Thus the future of pumpkin and squashes breeding lies in integrating the established classical techniques with advancements in bioinformatics, biochemistry, molecular genetics, molecular biology and genetic engineering. The advancement in sequencing or high-throughput genetic technology has casted a path to develop a breeding approach, which can integrate gene function/information and regulatory networks to predict and estimate the genetic variations in phenotypes for designing a desirable plant in silico.