REVIEW article
Front. Genet.
Sec. Genomics of Plants and the Phytoecosystem
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fgene.2025.1599242
This article is part of the Research TopicGenetic Dissection and Improvement of Crop Quality and Stress AdaptationView all 5 articles
Enhancing Quality and Climate Resilient Traits in Vegetatively Propagated Polyploids: Transgenic and Genome Editing Advancements, Challenges and Future Directions
Provisionally accepted
- Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Delaware State University, Dover, Delaware, United States
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Vegetatively propagated polyploid crops such as potato, strawberry, sugarcane, and banana play a crucial role in global agriculture by meeting essential nutritional and food demands. The quality of the economically important traits in these crops is significantly affected by global climate change. However, their complex genomes and clonal propagation nature pose significant challenges for traditional breeding to improve quality and climate-resilient traits. Transgenics and genome editing offer promising solutions in crop improvement to enhance yield, quality, and biotic and abiotic stress tolerance. Despite these advancements, several challenges persist, such as a lack of genotypeindependent transformation protocols, random transgene integration, unintended mutations, and somaclonal variation. The complexity of polyploid genomes also necessitates optimizing editing tools to improve precision and efficiency. Regulatory hurdles and public acceptance further influence the commercial success of genetically engineered crops. Employing efficient transgene-free genomeediting platforms can help to overcome the regulatory hurdles and accelerate breeding even in heterozygous backgrounds. This review reports the recent progress, obstacles, and prospects of transgenics and genome editing in vegetatively propagated crops, namely potato, strawberry, banana, and sugarcane, focusing on quality and climate-resilient traits and methods to address technical challenges and navigate regulatory hurdles. The reported advancements in genetic engineering approaches for addressing challenges in improving the vegetatively propagated polyploid crops have tremendous potential in ensuring food security and agricultural sustainability in the face of climate change.2021; Singh et al., 2023). Whereas several research and review articles have individually described transgenic and gene editing events in the context of climate resilience and quality related traits in vegetatively propagated crops (
Keywords: polyploids, Vegetative propagation, Genome editing, transgenics, Climate resilience, quality, Food security
Received: 24 Mar 2025; Accepted: 28 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sakthivel, Vennapusa and Melmaiee. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Kalpalatha Melmaiee, Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Delaware State University, Dover, 19901, Delaware, United States
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