Tomato breeding for processing in India: Current status and prospects

Abstract

Tomato is an important vegetable crop in the world for both fresh consumption and making processing products such as ketchup, sauce, paste etc. Tomato is rich source of nutrients and possesses health beneficial compounds.India is the second largest producer of tomato (20.57 mt) after China. In our country, most of tomatoes are consumed as fresh for vegetable purpose, and hardly <1% is only processed for making processed products compared to the developed countries like Italy (64.02%), Spain (39.41%) and USA (10.34%). Hence, there is a need of suitable varieties for processing purpose for year round cultivation to sustain the processing industries in the country with suitable growing regions.A large number of cultivated and wild tomato species are available in the world genebank, which have processing attributes. Although, previous efforts have generated a few varieties (e.g. Pusa Ruby, Roma, Punjab Chhuhara) for processing purpose but currently these old varieties do not meet the demand of modern processing industries. Hence, in this mini-review we summarise current status and prospects of breeding for processing varieties in India.