Agronomic biofortification of food crops: An emerging opportunity for global food and nutritional security

Abstract

Fortification of food with mineral micronutrients and micronutrient supplementation occupied the center stage during the two-year-long Corona Pandemic, highlighting the urgent need to focus on micronutrition. Focus has also been intensified on the biofortification (natural assimilation) of mineral micronutrients into food crops using various techniques like agronomic, genetic, or transgenic. Agronomic biofortification is a time-tested method and has been found useful in the fortification of several nutrients in several crops, yet the nutrient use and uptake efficiency of crops has been noted to vary due to different growing conditions like soil type, crop management, fertilizer type, etc. Agronomic biofortification can be an important tool in achieving nutritional security and its importance has recently increased because of climate change related issues, and pandemics such as COVID-19. The introduction of high specialty fertilizers like nano-fertilizers, chelated fertilizers, and water-soluble fertilizers that have high nutrient uptake efficiency and better nutrient translocation to the consumable parts of a crop plant has further improved the effectiveness of agronomic biofortification. Several new agronomic biofortification techniques like nutripriming, foliar application, soilless activation, and mechanized application techniques have further increased the relevance of agronomic biofortification. These new technological advances, along with an increased realization of mineral micronutrient nutrition have reinforced the relevance of agronomic biofortification for global food and nutritional security. The review highlights the advances made in the field of agronomic biofortification via the improved new fertilizer forms, and the emerging techniques that achieve better micronutrient use efficiency of crop plants.

Folate Biofortification in Soybean: Challenges and Prospects

“…Agronomic biofortification involves using agricultural techniques to increase the nutrient content in crops. This can include applying fertilizers, such as zinc or iron, or soil microbes to the soil in which the crops are grown [90][91][92][93]. The soil is the primary source of nutrients, and the abundance of nutrients in the soil and their availability to plants determine the synthesis of plant metabolites [94].…”

Onion Biofortification Using Selenium Bionanofertilizer and its Bulk Source under Sandy Soil Conditions

“…Selenium and nano-Se recently have an increased potential concern with focus on several topics such as improving yield and quality of fruits like pomegranate [29], tomato [30], radish [28], their significant in plant nutrition and crop quality [31], their sources in soils and plants [32], mediating cold stress tolerance in crops [33], and new frontier of plant biostimulant [34]. Due to their distinguished attributes (non-toxic, and its eco-safety), biological nano-Se was confirmed for biofortification compared to mineral and chemical nano-Se in many recent publications on different crops such as wheat (Triticum asetivum L.) [35], cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.) [36], banana [37], pak choi (Brassica chinensis) [38], rapeseed (Brassica napus L.) [33]radish [28] and Broccoli [40] Globally, around 2 billion people face the acute malnutrition, deficiency of vitamins and micronutrients deficiency, which might recover by fortification (for vitamins) and/or biofortification for nutrients [41]. Therefore, this is work focuses on foliar application two different sources of selenium (biological nanofertilizer and its bulk form) for producing biofortified onion under soil nutrient deficiency.…”