The genus
Passiflora
comprises a large number of plant species that grow as perennial or semiperennial vines, possess large flowers, and are cross‐pollinated. The plant can also be vegetatively propagated by cuttings or grafting. Yellow passionfruit (
P. edulis
f.
flavicarpa
) is the most widely planted species. Passionfruit is a crop of relatively recent commercial cultivation, displaying a high degree of genetic variability that can be easily exploited by conventional breeding. The development of cultivars has three main objectives: yield, fruit quality, and disease resistance. Of these, disease resistance has been the least successful and is the one for which biotechnology holds the greatest promises. The most likely short‐term development in terms of passionfruit transgenics is woodiness‐resistant plants. The results obtained so far are promising and indicate that resistance to passionfruit woodiness can be accomplished by expression of virus‐derived genomic fragments. Other desirable products would be plants with uniform fruit maturity, or self‐compatible. However, the biochemical pathways that control fruit setting and maturity, as well as self‐incompatibility in yellow passionfruit, are likely to involve a large number of genes and have not yet been dissected, and therefore such transgenic plants are not likely to be produced in the near future.