Plant Quality Improvement and Nutrigenomics

The three cardinals of human diets i.e., starch, protein and oil, are derived primarily from vegetable sources. With world's increasing population, there is urgent need not only to increase the output of existing crops but simultaneously improve their qualitative aspects as well. Additionally, emphasis is also required to introduce new crops in supplying diets in order to ease burden of the existing crop plants. Greater proportions of human population in the world derive their nutritional requirement of starch, primarily from rice. Large amount of publicly available information pertaining to both genomics and genetics in rice has enabled researchers to explore judiciously the molecular mechanisms controlling traits of economic interests. The article by Mustafiz et al. has nicely put together the efforts of various omics tools towards genetic improvement in rice. The article laid emphasis of molecular-genetic studies involving both forward and reverse genetic approaches to provide unequivocal evidence with regard to functions of genes associated with traits of economic importance. Additionally, to assist rice researchers the review documents in detail the invaluable resources emanating from transcriptomic, metabolomic and proteomic studies. Moreover, authors have strongly supported the idea of concerted and cumulative efforts involving both scientific tools and stakeholders in solving various issues pertaining to genetic enhancement in rice which can accommodate both quantitative as well as qualitative improvement. The second most important consideration to cater the increasing demands of human diets is the introduction of potential crops into our mainstream diets that can both supplement as well as reduce burden on primary starch yielding cereals crops such as rice and wheat. The above issue is addressed in article by Singh et al., detailing information and resources available with coarse cereals. The authors have emphasized that combination of both classical 'molecular breeding' and modern 'omics' approaches has great potential in addressing the issues related to bottlenecks associated with coarse cereals, more particularly their effective utilization as dietary components for humans. Authors have made significant effort in successes achieved in coarse cereal nutritional aspects from studies involving molecular mapping and 'omics' tools (genomics, proteomics and me-tabolomics). The hallmark of the article is underlined by their suggestion of analyzing promising germplasm of coarse cereals through cores/mini-cores in order to effectively solve the deficiency in traits of nutritional importance. Another article by Sytar et al. also laid the emphasis on importance of inclusion of non-traditional buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculemntum Moench) plants to address the problem …