This presentation is about achieving nutritional improvement in cereal crops involving various simple to complex technologies.

1. NUTRITIONAL IMPROVEMENT IN
CEREAL CROPS
Presented by;
 SEEMA CHAUDHARY
16BSCAGH226
 PRACHUR SHRESTHA
16BSCAGH227
 GOPI REDDY
16BSCAGH228
 SURAJ LAMSAL
16BSCAGH229
Presented to ;
Asst. Prof. Dr. K.P. RAO
CROP PHYSIOLOGY
BIOL-413

2. PARADIGM OF NUTRITION
IMPROVEMENT
 Over consumption in developed countries and
undernourishment in less developed countries is a global
issue.
 Nutritional improvement can be achieved through modification
of staple food.
 It is of little use producing a plant with supposed nutritional
benefit unless that actually improves the health of humans or
animals.
 Research to improve the nutritional quality of plants has
historically been limited by lack of basic knowledge of plant
metabolism and the compounding challenge of resolving the
complex interaction of thousands of metabolic pathway.

3. POSSIBLE WAYS OF NUTRITIONAL
IMPROVEMENT IN CEREALS
 Both traditional plant breeding and biotechnology
techniques are needed to metabolically engineer
plants with desired quality traits.
 Some possible ways to nutritionally improve cereal
crops are :
 Metabolic engineering
 Genetic engineering
 Nutritional improvement by fermentation
 Mutagenesis and TILLING
 Transgenesis
 Biofortification

4. METABOLIC ENGINEERING IN CEREALS
 Redirection of one or more enzymatic reactions to
improve the production of existing compound,
produce new compound or mediate the degradation
of undesirable compounds.
 It involves the redirection of cellular activities by the
modification of enzymatic reactions, transport and
regulatory functions of cells.

5. FERMENTATION TECHNIQUE
 Compared with animal food, nutritional quality of
cereal grains is inferior due to lower protein content,
deficiency of certain essential amino acids(lysine
and tryptophan in cereals), lower starch content
and presence of some anti-nutritional factors.
 Fermentation of cereals for a limited period of time
improves amino acid composition, vitamin content,
increases protein starch availabilities and lowers
the level of anti nutrients.

6. BIOFORTIFICATION OF CEREALS
 Biofortification is the process by which nutritional
quality of food crops is improved through agronomic
practices, conventional plant breeding or modern
biotechnology.
 More then 60% of the world population suffers from
iron deficiency and over 30% of global population
has zinc deficiency.
 Iron and zinc biofortification of cereals is considered
to be a cost effective solution to overcome the
malnutrition of these minerals.
 Biofortification aims at either increase in
accumulation of desired minerals in edible parts,
endosperm or to increase the bioavailability.

7. GENETIC ENGINEERING APPROACHES
 Genetically modified cereals developed by
modification of genes involved in homeostasis of
important minerals like iron, zinc, calcium,
phosphorus, potassium, etc. or genes influencing
bioavailability of these minerals are found to be
effective.
 With increased understanding of mineral uptake
and transport mechanism in plants, it is becoming
ever more possible to engineer biofortified crop
plant with ultimate goal of overcoming hidden
hunger.

8. MUTAGENESIS & TILLING
 Mutation breeding which is based on the use of
radiation or chemical agents to induce mutations,
has been proved to be very effective in generating
nutritional improvement.
 TILLING(Target Induced Local Lesions in
Genomes) combines classical mutagenesis and
PCR-based screening to identify required
mutations.
 Mutagenised population and TILLING platform
have been developed for cereals and are being
used in functional genomic studies and practical
breeding.

9. TRANSGENESIS
 Transgenesis is the process of introducing
exogenous gene –called a transgene into a crop so
that crop will exhibit new property and transmit that
property to its offspring.
 Transformation system are now available for major
cereals (wheat, rice, maize) and most of the minor
cereals including barley, oats, triticale, sorghum etc.
 The new gene inserted in certain crop is essential
for producing new amino acids, minerals ,vitamins
and other supplements in nutrition.

10. REFERENCES
 American Society of Plant Biologist;
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC 2442550
 link.springer.com/chapter10.1007