Cherry

Chapter “Cherry” provides information about cherry’s origin, taxonomy, and breeding techniques of the species available around the world. Across the globe, the cherry breeding programs have always worked on improving the quality of trees, and fruit quality traits, and incorporating resistance toward biotic and abiotic stress factors and also for the specific characters of few cultivars. Different breeding techniques (introduction, selection, seedling screening, hybridization, and nonconvention techniques such as embryo culture, pollen culture, and mutagenesis) have been discussed followed by a section dedicated to different problems in cherry breeding. Hereby, this chapter also highlights the importance of conserving the genetic resources and their application in different breeding programs for utilization in crop improvement, recent advancements in breeding strategies and the traits incorporated in the new genotypes through genomics. A section summarizing gametophytic incompatibility of sweet cherry, highlighting work conducted to identify the incompatible groups. Various molecular breeding approaches have been extensively described with special attention toward gene mapping and development of marker linked to monogenic and polygenic traits. The chapter also focuses on how different fruit characters are affected due to functional genes, different strategies being used after sequencing of cherry genome, and the underrated potential of genetic engineering.