Recent Advances in Crop Improvement of Chilli (Capsicum annuum L.) for High Fruit Yield and Quality

Abstract

Capsicum annuum L. is an indispensable spice cum vegetable crop cultivated worldwide for its edible fruit. The current research is majorly focused on the development of improved chilli varieties to achieve high fruit yield and quality to meet the rapidly growing market demands. Therefore, the screening of the chilli landraces and local cultivars for the genetic variation would provide best parents for the chilli crop improvement. Most of the recent chilli breeding programmes involve the assessment of genetic variation among the genotypes by the estimation of important genetic variation parameters such as phenotypic and genotypic coefficients of variation, heritability and genetic advance, gene flow, and cluster analysis. Correlation and path coefficient analysis was also applied to evaluate the progeny to understand the association between desired traits. The popular DNA-based molecular marker system, simple sequence repeat, is predominantly applied to understand the genetic variation as well as to select the desired progeny. In this current review, we discussed such recent research reports on chilli crop improvement for high fruit yield and quality, highlighted the recent major achievements and provided the important information for the chilli breeders.  We hope this current review would shed light on recent developments in chilli crop improvement and help chilli breeders for their future breeding programmes.