Biofortification of Sweet Potato: Enhancing Nutritional Quality for Improved Human Health

Malnutrition and hunger, particularly in developing nations, are caused by multitude of challenges including pandemics, extreme weather, poverty, an increasing human population, and high incidence of inadequate dietary diversity. Therefore, the problems with global food security are becoming increasingly severe. Due to micronutrient shortage, one-third of the world’s population faces the “hidden hunger” challenge. Notably in staple food crops, biofortification is an effective micronutrient-enrichment strategy to address hidden hunger Biofortification can be a low-cost, long-term solution to address micronutrient deficiencies in the population, hence reducing malnutrition and improving public health. Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam.) is the seventh-largest edible crop cultivated worldwide as it is easy to cultivate and rightly classified as a crop of the poor. It also differs from other significant staple food crops due to its high yield and stress resilience properties. Biofortified Orange-Fleshed Sweet Potato (OFSP) cultivars are efficient in reducing vitamin A deficiency due to their high content of β-carotene. Genetic modification employing transgenic technology can be very effective for nutritional purposes in addition to breeding and agronomic techniques. These are genetically modified to have more provitamin A by extracting the orange (Or) gene, which causes carotenoids to concentrate in plants. Furthermore, researchers used two techniques to increase the amounts of β-carotene in sweet potato, i.e., parent evaluation cum screening and molecular markers. Therefore, in this chapter, health advantages of biofortified sweet potatoes are briefly addressed.