ABSTRACT
The world's population is 6.2 billion and is expected to grow to near 9.6 billion by 2050, resulting in an expected 70% increase in food demand. Feeding nutritive food to the drastically increasing population with the available inputs, particularly in changed environmental conditions, is the biggest challenge for agriculture scientists. The level and composition of available nutrients vary from crop to crop and among crops, too. Improving the nutritional quality of major crops is an effective and straightforward solution, but has had limited success in conventional breeding. However, biotechnology combined with modern breeding tools has played a key role in the development of biofortified crops, which have the potential to fulfil the goal of attaining food security for present and future generations. This review is centered on ways to harness the amount of genetic variation available in the genetic pool of different crops through various biotechnological approaches that can better select genotypes both in terms of qualitative and quantitative characteristics. These approaches—marker-assisted breeding, mining elite alleles, genomic selection, genome editing, genome-wide association mapping, etc.—dramatically explore the natural genetic variation present in crops at the single nucleotide level and open up a way to assess individual nutritional requirement-based research and gene-nutrient interaction-based studies. Omics technologies (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics) has speed up nutrigenetics- and nutrigenomics-related research, which can help to identify the cause behind the genetic basis of individuals with response to the same nutritional uptake. High-throughput sequencing technologies generate a huge dataset, which can help provide an insight into crop genomes in a very short time as well as allow genome-specific nutrition-based comparative studies.
