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Background Global climate is changing more rapidly than ever, threatening plant growth and productivity while exerting considerable direct and indirect effects on the quality and quantity of plant nutrients. Scope This review focuses on the global impact of climate change on the nutritional value of plant foods. It showcases the existing evidence linking the effects of climate change factors on crop nutrition and the concentration of nutrients in edible plant parts. It focuses on the effect of elevated CO 2 (eCO 2), elevated temperature (eT), salinity, waterlogging and drought stresses, and what is known regarding their direct and indirect influence on nutrient availability. Furthermore, it provides possible strategies to preserve the nutritional composition of plant foods under changing climates. Conclusions Climate change has an impact on the accumulation of minerals and protein in crop plants, with eCO 2 being the underlying factor of most of the reported changes. The effects are clearly dependent on the type, intensity and duration of the imposed stress, plant genotype and developmental stage. Strong interactions (both positive and negative) can be found between individual climatic factors and soil availability of nitrogen (N), potassium (K), iron (Fe) and phosphorous (P). The development of future interventions to ensure that the world's population has access to plentiful, safe and nutritious food may need to rely on breeding for nutrients under the context of climate change, including legumes in cropping systems, better farm management practices and utilization of microbial inoculants that enhance nutrient availability.

Pulses are nutrient-dense foods that have for a long time been empirically known to have beneficial effects in human health. In the last decade, several studies have gathered evidence of the metabolic benefits of pulse intake. However, it remains unclear at what amounts these effects may be attained. This study aimed to systematically review the scientific outputs of the last two decades regarding health benefits of pulse consumption and the amounts necessary for positive outcomes to be achieved. A PubMed search including keywords [

SummaryDothistroma needle blight (DNB), caused by the two fungi Dothistroma septosporum and D. pini, is a major disease of pines with a worldwide distribution. Increases in the incidence and severity of disease in areas where the disease has long been established and notable range expansions have both recently been observed. The aim of this review was to assess the relationship between DNB, weather factors and climate to better understand possible underlying causes of this recent intensification in disease. A substantial body of literature shows that the life cycles of the fungi are closely related to weather factors such as precipitation and temperature. Given the rapid response of DNB to favourable weather conditions, it seems plausible that changes in disease behaviour could be due to changes in climate. The recurrent El Niño-Southern oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon influences patterns of temperature and precipitation in many regions of the world, often resulting in warmer and wetter conditions than normal. We found that since the 1950s, four of the past five strong El Niño events appear to have coincided with reports of increased DNB activity on an intercontinental scale. The lack of long-term standardized data records limits our ability to fully interpret this relationship, but the projected future climatic conditions in the Northern Hemisphere appear to be increasingly favourable for the disease. Still, other areas of the world may become less favourable, and further research is required to be able to accurately predict DNB outbreaks and their impact on pine forests in the future.

Plant-based foods offer a wide range of nutrients that are essential for human and animal health. Among these nutrients, iron stands out as one of the most important micronutrients. Increasing the iron content in many staple and non-staple plant foods continues to be a goal of many scientists around the world. However, the success of such initiatives has sometimes fallen short of their expected targets. In this review we highlight the most recent and promising results that have contributed to increasing the iron content in different crops. We also discuss methods that to date have been used to reach iron biofortification goals and new strategies that we believe are most promising for crop biofortification in the future. Plant anatomical, physiological and metabolic hurdles still need to be tackled for making progress on further increasing currently reached levels of micronutrient improvements. New strategies need to take into account growing environmental challenges that may constrain biofortification efforts.

Soybean (Glycine max Merr.) production is reduced under iron-limiting calcareous soils throughout the upper Midwest regions of the US. Like other dicotyledonous plants, soybean responds to iron-limiting environments by induction of an active proton pump, a ferric iron reductase and an iron transporter. Here we demonstrate that heterologous expression of the Arabidopsis thaliana ferric chelate reductase gene, FRO2, in transgenic soybean significantly enhances Fe(+3) reduction in roots and leaves. Root ferric reductase activity was up to tenfold higher in transgenic plants and was not subjected to post-transcriptional regulation. In leaves, reductase activity was threefold higher in the transgenic plants when compared to control. The enhanced ferric reductase activity led to reduced chlorosis, increased chlorophyll concentration and a lessening in biomass loss in the transgenic events between Fe treatments as compared to control plants grown under hydroponics that mimicked Fe-sufficient and Fe-deficient soil environments. However, the data indicate that constitutive FRO2 expression under non-iron stress conditions may lead to a decrease in plant productivity as reflected by reduced biomass accumulation in the transgenic events under non-iron stress conditions. When grown at Fe(III)-EDDHA levels greater than 10 microM, iron concentration in the shoots of transgenic plants was significantly higher than control. The same observation was found in the roots in plants grown at iron levels higher than 32 microM Fe(III)-EDDHA. These results suggest that heterologous expression of an iron chelate reductase in soybean can provide a route to alleviate iron deficiency chlorosis.