Vol. 9, Special Issue 9, Part P (2025)

Vegetables play a vital role in human life as they are rich sources of essential vitamins, minerals, dietary fiber, and antioxidants, contributing to balanced nutrition, disease prevention, and overall health. They are also keys to ensuring food and nutritional security, especially in developing countries where vegetables form a major part of daily diets. However, vegetable production is increasingly threatened by salinity stress. In India, where large areas of arable land are affected by soil salinization due to irrigation practices, poor drainage, and climate change, vegetable cultivation faces severe challenges. Globally, rising salinity in agricultural soils exacerbated by seawater intrusion, overuse of chemical fertilizers and water scarcity is degrading vegetable productivity. Plants defend themselves against salinity stress through a combination of physiological, biochemical and molecular strategies. Different transgenic methods such as Agrobacterium-mediated transformation, gene gun (biolistic) delivery and CRISPR/Cas-based genome editing enable the precise introduction or modification of genes that improve salinity tolerance in vegetables. These approaches allow incorporation of traits like ion homeostasis, osmolyte biosynthesis, and antioxidant defense, which are difficult to achieve through conventional breeding due to genetic limitations and long breeding cycles. Thus, transgenic breeding provides a faster, targeted, and reliable strategy to develop salt-tolerant vegetable varieties, ensuring stable yields and quality under saline condition.