ABSTRACT
The composition of food and feed crops has economic value, and is also an important determinant of quality for the development of diets to promote the healthy growth of people and animals. A major goal of many plant breeding programs, whether using traditional methods or modern biotechnology such as genetic modication (GM), is to maintain compositional quality while improving agronomic traits such as yield, pest resistance, or herbicide tolerance. Other programs seek to enhance the nutritional value of important crops through change in the endogenous levels of nutrients, antinutrients, vitamins, and minerals. Crop composition, however, encompasses a very broad range of natural variability in endogenous levels of different constituents. This variation is an important consideration in experimental designs and analyzes to evaluate the impact of novel traits and nutritional enhancements on compositional and metabolite proles in new crops. We describe here how compositional studies conducted during comparative safety assessments of novel crops have led to a further understanding of the contribution of environmental and genetic factors to compositional and metabolite variation.
