Reconfiguring biofortification strategies to transform food systems and address micronutrient deficiency of the 21st century.
Tiozon RJN, Fernie AR, Sreenivasulu N
Crop Improvement
Seed banks hold thousands of forgotten vegetable and grain varieties that are far more nutritious than what fills grocery shelves — and breeders are finally starting to mine them seriously.
Most farming over the past century focused on growing more food, not more nutritious food. This review argues we need to flip that priority by finding naturally nutrient-rich crop relatives stored in seed banks and using modern plant breeding — including precise gene editing — to bring those traits into everyday crops. The exciting part is that many plants share the same underlying biological switches for building vitamins and minerals, so improvements in one crop could speed up improvements in many others.
Key Findings
Global seed banks contain largely untapped germplasm with significantly higher mineral, vitamin, and phytochemical profiles than currently cultivated varieties.
Conserved nutrient-regulatory pathways across crop species offer a unified framework that could accelerate biofortification of multiple crops simultaneously rather than one at a time.
Combining genome-editing tools with systematic crop diversity screening is proposed as the most scalable path to addressing micronutrient deficiencies affecting hundreds of millions globally.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists are calling for a smarter approach to making crops more nutritious — not just more abundant. By tapping into overlooked plant varieties from global seed banks and using modern gene-editing tools, researchers believe we can build food systems that fight vitamin and mineral deficiencies at scale.
Abstract Preview
Despite achieving substantial progress in caloric food security, micronutrient deficiencies remain a major global health challenge, highlighting a persistent disconnect between crop productivity an...
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