An Outlook on GWAS with a Special Focus on Solanaceous Vegetable Crops – A Review

The commercial solanaceous group of vegetables viz., Tomato, Brinjal, Peppers, and Potatoes hold a prime position among all other vegetables in terms of cultivation and consumption worldwide. These vegetables are consumed fresh by all strata of people and are also used as raw materials in the processing industries. Hence, most plant breeders have a keen interest in the crop improvement of these crops emphasizing yield improvement, quality and nutraceuticals enrichment and imparting resistance to various biotic and abiotic stresses in accordance with climate change. Most of the desirable traits are polygenic in nature which may have a complex inheritance pattern. It is essential to have clear-cut knowledge of the expression frequencies of multiple genes/alleles governing a particular quantitative trait/phenotype, the methods employed to examine and comprehend the candidate genes governing one or various characteristics in plants are quantitative trait loci mapping and genome-wide association studies. In This review, we have discussed GWAS and its future perspectives and made efforts to tabulate the recent past works done in solanaceous vegetable crops using this approach. GWAS is a attractive strategy that constitutes an important advancement in genetic analysis and has unquestionably proven to be a useful tool in identifying candidate genes, which is justified in this article.