Fruits are a major source of fiber, nutrients, and antioxidants;
all essential for a healthy diet. Fruit crops play a
key role in the economy of both developed and developing
countries, and as such, efforts have been made to improve
the quality of these crops using both conventional breeding
and genetic engineering, which emerged as a major tool for
introducing desirable genes in fruit crops. However, societal
distrust for such technologies, coupled with misleading
and false information regarding their safety, means that
traditional GM technology has been difficult, or impossible
to commercialize successfully. For the past two decades,
genetic transformation of fruit crops has mainly focused on
the enhancement of biotic and abiotic tolerance; however,
there are few cases of field evaluation and commercialization
of these transgenic plants worldwide.