Biofortification Technologies Used in Agriculture in Relation to Micronutrients

Micronutrient malnutrition is a serious public health problem in many developing countries. Different interventions are currently used, but their overall coverage is relatively limited. Biofortification—that is, breeding staple food crops for higher micronutrient contents—is a new agriculture-based approach. The density of minerals and vitamins in food staples eaten widely by the poor may be increased either through conventional plant breeding or using transgenic techniques, a process known as biofortification. Hence, increasing the concentration of bioavailable micronutrients in edible crop tissues (biofortification) has become a promising strategy in modern agriculture, allowing the access of more nutritious foods to more people, with the use of fewer resources. Traditional agricultural practices can partly enhance the nutritional value of plant foods, but the advances in the “omics” technologies are rapidly being exploited to engineer crops with enhanced key nutrients. Ionomics, or the study of the ionome (which can be defined as the mineral trace element composition of a particular organism), is a modern functional genomics tool that can provide high-throughput information about the broad-spectrum nutrient composition of a given plant food. In alliance with other “omics” technologies, such as genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics, it can be used to identify numerous genes with important roles in the uptake, transport, and accumulation of mineral nutrients in plant foods, in their edible parts.