JOURNAL OF SOIL SCIENCE AND PLANT NUTRITION, cilt.23, sa.1, ss.139-151, 2023 (SCI-Expanded)
Production of melon (Cucumis melo L.) is hampered by abiotic and biotic stress factors aggravated by climate change. To counter these challenges, plant breeders are employing biotechnological tools to generate high-yielding and stress-tolerant varieties to satisfy consumer and market demands. Currently, biotechnological tools are being used to complement conventional crop improvement and speed up the development of new varieties. This review highlights advances in biotechnological techniques for reducing the yield gap in melon crop production grown under saline and drought stress conditions. It also summarizes the current state of advanced biotechnological methods used for different objectives in melon crops grown under drought and salt stresses. In this review, we discussed and highlighted some difficulties that impeded the efficient obtention of enough melon yield productivity in previous years, and we also emphasized the greater contribution of biotechnological approaches to enhance global melon crop production. Further studies are required to thoroughly unravel the governing of drought and salt tolerance in melon species to develop quality and yield. In perspective, the use of high-throughput screening techniques and molecular markers is reported as a rapid and successful system to assess drought/salinity tolerance and high-yielding traits in numerous melon genotypes and produce new cultivars that contain the important and needed genes in a short period with an effective cost. Currently, biotechnological techniques such as MAS (marker-assisted selection), transcriptomics, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and epigenomics, CRISPR/Cas9 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/cas9), SNPs (single-nucleotide polymorphism), GWAS (genome-wide association study), and GBS (genotyping-by-sequencing) have gained appreciation among breeders, for distinct purposes.