The book contains 11 chapters by authors based in national research institutes and universities. Two introductory chapters give standard reviews of crop brassicas (and radish) and their breeding, with anecdotal accounts of the breeding of B. rapa vegetables in Korea.

Many genetic studies of Brassica have been prompted by the wide array of morphological and physiological types, by species with known evolutionary relationships, including hybrid polyploids, and by close relatedness to the extensively studied Arabidopsis thaliana. The next six chapters review these studies, covering the cytogenetics of the genus Brassica, its molecular taxonomy, genome mapping and architecture and genetic transformation. The last three chapters describe transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and bioinformatics. There are limited references to vegetable forms of brassicas beyond short accounts of the genetics of disease resistance, self-incompatibility and glucosinolates. Other important objectives of brassica vegetable breeding such as cosmetic/culinary properties and predictable maturity are scarcely discussed.

The book adds little to a contemporary review covering the same topic (Schmidt and Bancroft, Reference Schmidt and Bancroft2011), but complements a recent review of more traditional methodologies and achievements in brassica breeding (Gupta, Reference Gupta2009).