Biofortification of Wheat: Nourishing Communities and Overcoming Nutritional Deficiencies

Micronutrients play an important role in normal human body development, deficiency of which could lead to stunted growth, weak immunity and many physiological disorders. The people of the developing countries are more prone to deficiencies of essential micronutrients and such deficiencies of these are termed as hidden hunger. Wheat being one of the major staple cereal crops could serve as a potential source to reduce the hidden hunger as it contributes up to 25% of dietary calories and proteins. Many genetic and agronomical approaches have been employed to biofortify wheat. Genetic biofortification provides an easy, economical and sustainable solution, especially in lower- to middle-income communities around the world. The potential and unexploited wild relatives have genetic variation for enhanced micronutrient content, which can be exploited to introgress novel genes and QTLs leading to their introgression in cultivated hexaploid wheat using genomic-assisted breeding. In wheat different wild relatives and progenitors such as T. monococcum, T. speltoides, T. dicoccoides, T. dicoccon, Aegilops tauschii, etc. have been reported to possess a huge variability for grain Iron and Zinc concentration but these have been exploited to only a limited extent. Thus, wild wheat and progenitor species could serve as a good candidate for developing biofortified wheat cultivars for reducing the burgeoning hidden hunger in an efficient way without adding to the input cost and burdening the ecosystem.