Sustainable Crop Production Systems and Human Nutrition

Daniel P Roberts,Autar K Mattoo

doi:10.3389/fsufs.2019.00072

Abstract

There is a pressing need for redesigning agriculture to achieve sustainability and for utilizing modern genetic tools, including genetic engineering, to add nutritional value to crops for the benefit of the diverse human population. Collectively, plant foods contain most minerals, macronutrients (calories), and micronutrients essential for human nutrition. These plant foods also contain a range of bioactive compounds that can play important roles in the prevention of chronic diseases including heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cataracts, and age-related functional decline. However, these bioactive nutrients are often present at marginal concentrations in edible plant tissues in regard to human nutrition/prevention of disease. The quantity of these nutrients in edible plant tissues is primarily dependent on crop genetics and regulated by complex and overlapping mechanisms in response to developmental and environmental cues. Environmental cues are naturally occurring - temperature, light intensity and other stressors, or result from crop production system components - fertilizer, tillage operations, etc. One strategy for sustainable, next-generation crop development is to design cropping systems that have minimal or lesser impact on the environment and to use genetic approaches to enhance crop nutritional content. This strategy is appealing since crop genetics is the primary driver of plant nutrient content and because purely managing crop production fields to optimize crop nutrient content is extremely challenging if not impossible. As an example we present the development of a next-generation sustainable tomato production system with beneficial impacts on tomato physiology and nutritional quality of the tomato fruit. Our analysis of the metabolomes of tomato cultivars in this and other cropping systems highlights the need for robust cultivars that consistently express nutritional and other desirable traits across cropping systems and under differing environmental conditions.

Highlights

The increasing human population confronts agriculture with unprecedented challenges
B vitamins are a set of eight water-soluble vitamins that function as enzyme cofactors, or their precursors, for enzymes that function in core metabolic processes
The hairy vetch cropping system has relatively lower soil temperatures, different N fertility, and an altered soil microbial community (Teasdale and Abdul-Baki, 1997; Buyer et al, 2010). Consistent with these findings, when three tomato cultivars were grown in a conventional production system at two field locations that varied in environmental conditions reprogramming of transcription and the metabolome occurs in a genotype-specific manner (D’Espito et al, 2017)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The increasing human population confronts agriculture with unprecedented challenges. More food of higher nutritional content will be needed to feed the anticipated world population of 8–10 billion by 2050 (Foley et al, 2011; Martin, 2013; Mattoo, 2014; Martin and Li, 2017). Prior breeding programs focused on increasing disease resistance, fruit set and size, and grain fill (Grusak and DellaPenna, 1999; Borlaug, 2000; Lei et al, 2007; Wang et al, 2008; Kyriacou and Rouphael, 2018) Such crop cultivars contained calorie-rich macronutrients such as fat, protein, and carbohydrate but not necessarily adequate vitamins, minerals, and other phytochemicals to meet human nutritional needs. The amino acids histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, and valine must be obtained from ingested protein in dietary sources Insufficient quantities of these essential micronutrients and minerals in the diet can have long-term negative impacts on human health and lead to classical micronutrient deficiency diseases (Grusak and DellaPenna, 1999; White and Broadley, 2009; Oliver and Gregory, 2015; DíazGómez et al, 2017; Vasconcelos et al, 2017). Selective accumulation of α-carotene derivatives occur while under high light β-carotene derivatives accumulate (Esteban et al, 2015)

B Vitamins

CONCLUSIONS