How can you use metabolic engineering to create crops with greater nutritional value?

One nutritional enhancement for the future will be enhancing the biosynthesis of certain nutrients in certain crops consumed in Western Nigeria. That folklore claims to improve fertility and also aid child labour in women who consume this crops.

The nutritional enhancement of crops holds significant implications for global health and food security. As the world's population continues to grow, there is a pressing need to address malnutrition and deficiencies in essential nutrients. By using metabolic engineering and biotechnology to enhance the nutritional content of crops, we can contribute to combating dietary deficiencies and improving overall public health.

The best way is to engineer the cells basically with the selection and cloning of constitutive promoters upstream of the desired pathway that gives rise to end products of high economic value. Other robust molecular approaches could also be used.

The engineering strategy is more nuanced than overexpression and knockdown. A helpful way to conceptualize metabolism is to consider it as a carbon flux, eventually being secreted. One can liken this process to water flowing through a large hose, which then diverges into various hoses of different sizes. Now, imagine implementing a knockdown, analogous to pinching one of the exit hoses in the water analogy. What impact do you anticipate on the others? Intuitively, reducing the flow to one exit hose would likely lead to an increased flow in the remaining ones. While the analogy may not capture all complexities, it is common that when a gene is knocked out or down, the metabolic flux of carbon undergoes changes affecting other compounds.

Another way I look forward to is promoter engineering i.e adding promoters upstream of genes involved in the biosynthesis of specific compounds. and also adding promoters that could respond to certain conditions such as UV, or antigenic proteins from pathogenic bacteria that might plague the plants.

Once the target nutrients to be enhanced have been identified, understanding relevant metabolic pathways, and selecting or modifying genes associated with the nutrient synthesis should be the next. Through optimizing gene expression levels and utilizing tissue-specific regulation, advanced breeding, and gene-editing techniques, we can enhance the value of those nutrients in crops.

Analytical tools are the main methods for studying what happens, before a gene is turned on(genomics), the time its turned on and before a metabolite is produced(transcriptomics) and after a metabolite has been produced (metabolomics). These tools are critical in validating the results of metabolic engineering.

Analytical tools are required for rigorous testing to ensure the desired changes are achieved, considering factors such as nutrient content and potential environmental impacts.

It is crucial to consider the potential environmental impacts of metabolic engineering, including unintended effects on ecosystems and biodiversity. Ensuring the long-term sustainability of engineered crops requires careful evaluation of their agronomic performance, resilience to biotic and abiotic stresses, and compatibility with existing agricultural practices.