Genomics-Enabled Breeding for Enhancing Micronutrients in Crops

Abstract

Improving nutritional health is one of the major socioeconomic challenges of the twenty-first century, especially with continuously growing population in developing country. Of the various nutrient intake choices, plant-based foods offer an array of nutrients which are essential for human nutrition and promote good health. Majority of staple food crops in the world are often deficient in the essential nutrients but with available of huge germplasm collections from diverse gene pool offer an opportunity to utilize in quality breeding program for improving micronutrients. However, pulses have got an added advantage over cereals and oilseeds of having enriched level of essential micronutrient in their diverse gene pool. Hence, utilizing these genetic resources using conventional breeding program and further adapting next-generation sequencing (NSG)-based novel genomic approaches to engineer designer crops with enhanced key micronutrient level in background of superior variety will be the future challenges before researcher to ensure the nutritional security in developing country. Here, we compiled the work done in cereals, oilseeds, and pulses for enriched nutrient status worldwide. These preliminary works and remarkable achievements in different crops established knowledge towards biofortified crops to revolutionize the entire community depending on plant-based food for essential nutrients to overcome the nutritional challenge in order to achieve malnutrition-free society.