Horticulture continues to contribute towards sustaining a healthy
environment, enriching our lives with a wide array of visually appealing products and
adding diversity, color, and flavor to the meals we eat. The numerous advantages of
horticulture are being advanced by new instruments brought about by biotechnology.
Globalization and liberalization of the Indian economy have created opportunities for
exporting high-value horticulture crops while also serving domestic demand.
Increasing production as well as quality is vital in order to satisfy the demands of
quality-conscious consumers. Beyond guaranteeing a vertical rise in productivity, an
improvement in production technology is needed to integrate market-driven quality
standards with the production system. “Protected cultivation,” sometimes known as
greenhouse technology, is one such technique. The three primary elements that impact
production and quality are cultural practices, growth conditions, and quality material.
Micropropagation is a successful technique in many horticultural crops to produce
disease-free planting material rapidly. Other biotechnological tools like rDNA/genetic
engineering offer the scope for genetic modification of plants with desirable
characteristics like resistance to biotic and abiotic factors, improvement in quality
parameters, increase in crop yield, herbicide resistance, etc. Similarly, the use of
molecular markers in genetic diversity studies and crop improvement helps in the
identification of desirable genes and understanding at the molecular level. This
industrial technology and the business procedures, however, come with a number of
issues. Hence, the present book chapter illustrates the role of biotechnology in
enhancing crop productivity in a controlled environment.
Keywords: Biotechnology, Genetic engineering, Micropropagation, Protected cultivation rDNA technology.
