Chilli: A Solanaceous Crop with Tremendous Attributes

Chilli (Capsicum annuum L.) is one of the major commercial crop, cultivated for vegetables and spices. In the recent past it has emerged as industrial crops. Red colour in chilli is mainly due to oleoresin and it provides flavor, colour for processing industries, natural colour for cosmetic industries and pharmaceutical ingredients to medicine industries. Besides colour another quality attribute of chilli fruit is pungency. Capsaicin determines the pungency. Capsaicin extract mainly used as major ingredient in pharmaceutical industries for manufacturing pain balm. This book brings the focus on screening of chilli germplasm, inbreds and cms-based hybrids (developed and evaluated) for their quality and yield traits in order to identify the lines/hybrids having less pungency and high colour content and vise versa can directly be utilized to evaluate their potential for capsaicin and oleoresin extraction.Evaluation of chilli germplasm for ascorbic acid leads to the future quality breeding objectives.This book is informative for fertility restoration test and restorer and maintainer genes were assign to the inbred lines. The use of cms helps in cost effective hybrid seed production.