**4. Conclusion**

Classical genetics and traditional breeding techniques have made great contribution in better understanding and genetic improvement of cucumber crop for several qualitative and quantitative traits, understanding of phylogenetic relationship and taxonomy. Using traditional breeding methods, cucumber breeder have identified a number of genes associated with economic traits and used this information to develop early and high yielding cultivars. Advancement of some quantitative characters using traditional methodology is difficult and time consuming process. Therefore molecular markers technology offers an avenue to overcome the hurdles associated with traditional breeding. Molecular breeding has played a significant role in better understanding of cucumber genetics, and has been directly responsible for some of the improvement made in modern cucumber cultivars in different market classes. Classical breeders have said "Anything is possible using traditional approaches; it is just that the world is not large enough to hold the populations needed to find the variation required for some traits. As we move forward with molecular breeding in cucumber, it is important that we understand the need to maintain traditional breeding programs, and that the skill set required for classical breeding is not lost.
