Enhancing the Health-Promoting Effects of Tomato Fruit for Biofortified Food

Table 4

Advantages and disadvantages of metabolic engineering and plant breeding.

Metabolic engineering	Plant breeding
Advantages
(i) Fast; (ii) Easy to apply to the elite cultivar; (iii) Genes from other organism can be inserted; (iv) Genes are inserted directly into the plant genome and are transmitted to offspring; (v) Possible selection of the expression organs	(i) It uses the natural genome variation of crop; (ii) Few legal regulations to follow
Disadvantages
(i) Many legal regulations regarding the landscape; (ii) Political and socioeconomic disputes about the “transgenics”	(i) Restricted to the crop gene pool; (ii) Restricted to the only sexually compatible plants; (iii) It needs work for a long time and with a high number of generations to have plants with the genes of interest