Recent trends in agro-technology, post-harvest management and molecular characterisation of pomegranate

ABSTRACT

Pomegranate (Punica granatum L.), a fruit-bearing shrub with extensive genetic and geographical diversity, effectively takes its place among several other significant global fruit crops. The global demand for pomegranate is increasing consistently since this fruit has recently been merited with the status of a ‘super fruit’; apart from its other culinary and medicinal (both ethnomedical and modern) uses. Thus, researchers from different parts of the world have been trying to standardise agro-technical, in vitro-biotechnological and molecular-marker-assisted technologies for enhanced production, superior plant protection, post-harvest management, and genetic improvement of pomegranate, grown in various agro-climatic zones. Upon realising this context, the present review was framed after an extensive groundwork, carried out on 250 published scientific articles, reports, bulletins, and web pages extracted from various scientific (CeRA, Google Scholar, JGate, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science) and public (Google and Bing) domains, in order to summarise most of the recent advancements in botanical, ethno-medicinal uses, agro-technological advancements, post-harvest management and molecular characterisation of pomegranate. This review further includes surveys on multiple technologies, along with their achievements and demerits that need immediate attention of the pomegranate researchers for sustainable improvement of this fruit crop, with immense medicinal value.

KEYWORDS:

• Agronomic management
• ethno-botanical use
• micropropagation
• molecular marker
• shelf-life
• value addition

Acknowledgments

Authors acknowledge the University e-library assistance from Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya, West Bengal, India. We are further thankful to the anonymous reviewer(s) and the editor of this article for their critical comments and suggestions on the manuscript.

Authors’ contribution

SG, SS, SS conceived the idea of the review and surveyed the literature; SS, SS, MM, SG drafted the manuscript equally; SG scrutinized and corrected the manuscript to its final version. All the authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript prior to its submission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

The authors have no funding to report.