At present, more than 700 million people live with caloric hunger, and more than 2 billion suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, known as "hidden hunger." By prioritizing high yield over nutritional quality, global calorie production has increased while exacerbating vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Stress from climate change has been shown to further reduce the densities of several nutrients.
A recent study led by Prof. Dominique Van Der Straeten from the Laboratory of Functional Plant Biology at Ghent University (Belgium), in collaboration with the University of Liège, indicates that future climate scenarios will strongly diminish the density of multiple B vitamins and minerals in wheat grains, posing a significant challenge for global public health. The work is published in Advanced Science.
In a related opinion review published in Nature, Van Der Straeten and colleagues from institutions worldwide investigated the possibilities offered by diverse genetic technologies to enhance the density of vitamins and minerals in crops, combined with higher resilience against climate change. The authors examined how CRISPR-Cas, a breeding technology already adopted by many countries that allows genome editing with extremely high precision, could be used to enhance micronutrient densities to the levels necessary to alleviate dietary vitamin and mineral deficiencies.
Furthermore, given the limited time frame available to achieve zero hunger (SDG2, aimed at by 2030), the authors argue that CRISPR-Cas technologies should be applied in combination with other genetic engineering technologies, including transformation, to address these important societal issues of the 21st century.
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