Transgenic approach towards development of cold stress tolerant vegetables for high altitude areas

High altitude areas are the most different terrains with cold/freezing asone the major problem which reduces the crop duration, affects quality andproductivity as most part of the year is covered with unfavourable climaticconditions not suited for crop growth. Despite continued efforts, traditionalbreeding gave limited success in imparting crop plants with better freezingtolerance due to very little understanding about the mechanisms that regulatechilling and freezing tolerance. The constraints of conventional breeding can beovercome by application of modern biotechnology tools. Various traits such asbiotic stress resistance, quality and storage life have been successfully engineeredinto vegetable crops and some of them have been commercialized to some extentin different countries. Although the progress in commercialization of transgenicvegetable crops has been relatively slow, transgenic vegetables engineered forcold tolerance will contribute significantly to the high altitude agriculture in nearfuture. In this review article we discuss the effect of cold stress on plants, themechanism developed by plants to cope with cold stress and also mention aboutdifferent techniques that can be applied for crop improvement for cold stress inparticular. This review also focus on different cold related genes identified so farfor development of transgenics for cold tolerance in different crops and DRDO,biotechnology initiatives in identification, isolation, characterization and cloningof cold tolerant genes for developing transgenic vegetables for cold tolerance forhigh altitude agriculture.