Harnessing Metabolic Diversity for Nutraceutical Plant Breeding

Most of the world's population, which has recently reached 7 billion, lives below the global hunger index. Alternatively, western cultures with easy access to food suffer from poor health and debilitating diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease, auto-immune diseases, and mental disorders, contributing to millions of deaths each year. In essence, both developing countries and western societies are starving to death due either to the lack of foods or the lack of healthy foods. Moreover, when developing countries achieve a certain social economic status, they begin adopting dietary practices of westerns societies. Although plant breeding has primarily focused on production as a means to sustain the food requirement of the ever growing world's population, the new challenge is to incorporate human health benefits in plant based foods, also called as nutraceuticals. With the recent technological advancements in biological sciences and instrumentation, nutraceutical breeding is becoming easier. Metabolomics is a key technology available to plant breeders that can combine with existing technologies to breed healthier and more nutritious plant food while maintaining production practices.