Genome Modification Approaches to Improve Performance, Quality, and Stress Tolerance of Important Mediterranean Fruit Species (Olea europaea L., Vitis vinifera L., and Quercus suber L.).

In the last decades the interest on traditional Mediterranean fruits highly increased, not only due to the constant demand of consumers for new crop alternatives, but also due to the identification in such species of molecules with important properties for human health (e.g. resveratrol from grapes and oleuropein from olives). Efforts to improve the production capacity and fruit quality in such fruit species, as well as the resistance to biotic and abiotic stress, was achieved by plant breeders using mainly classical breeding approaches (e.g. selection, hybridization and mutagenesis), nevertheless, breeding support by plant tissue culture techniques, marker assisted selection, as well as by genome modification, was also used. Here we will present the state of the art related with the production of transgenic plants in three Mediterranean fruit species with important impact on the economy, olive, grapevine and cork. The achievements, problems and future perspectives will be discussed.This work was financially supported by national funds through FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) under the Project UID/AGR/00115/2013, PTDC/BIA-BQM/28539/2017, by the Project OLEAVALOR (ALT20-03-0145-FEDER000014) funded by FEDER funds through the Program Alentejo 2020; Hélia Cardoso and Susana Serrazina were supported by FCT through post-doc fellowship SFRH/BPD/109849/2015 and SFRH/BPD/108653/2015, respectively; Andreia Figueiredo was also supported by the investigator FCT program IF/00819/2015