Induced mutations for enhancing nutrition and food production

Issues of enhanced food security depend primarily on increasing agricultural production. Given this challenge, existing and new, appropriate technologies need to be integrated into agricultural research, to focus on the problems related to improving nutritional security. Among the different approaches, mutagenesis and the isolation of improved or novel phenotypes in conjunction with conventional breeding programmes can result in mutant varieties endowed with desirable traits. Induced mutations play an important role enhancing nutritional quality in crop plants. Several mutant genes have been successfully introduced into commercial crop varieties that significantly enhance the nutritional value of crops. This review briefly outlines the aspects of induced mutations and nutritional quality in crop improvement. Introduction Agricultural development has always been on the move towards increasing crop productivity and exploiting natural resources. Such a developmental program necessitates coordination between agricultural activities, ecosystems, and human society. It is imperative that sustainable use of natural resources should be prudently managed in conjunction with the advancement in the knowledge gained from science and technology. Today human population is growing rapidly especially in the developing countries whereas in the developed countries the situation is just the reverse. Global food security continues to be the centre stage issue and plant breeders are under pressure to sustain the food production to meet the demand of ever-growing human population. Further to the problem, the erratic climatic change because of its direct effects on both food production and food security has mounted the pressure to develop sustainable (Jain 2010a). Several factors such as abiotic and biotic stresses, industrial pollution, deforestation, loss of genetic diversity, water shortages and so on are responsible for having a negative impact on food production. The world population is expected to reach 7 billion in the next 20 years, and 10 billion by 2050. The question is, Can we feed the world and sustain Article