All Roads Leading to: Iron Phytofortification

Abstract

Enhancing the nutritional quality of food crops is an arena of research that is receiving much footfall among the scientific fraternity, owing to the heavy dependence of humans on plant-based diets. These diets often lack essential micronutrients like iron, thus compromising health and productivity, especially among women and children from impoverished countries. Additionally, although iron is abundant in soil, the calcareous nature of soil renders it unavailable to the plant. This has aggravated the problem, as the bioavailability of iron from staple plant foods is already low in humans. Thus, increasing iron content in the edible portions of the plant may help ameliorate this deficit. Toward this, the past decade has witnessed extensive focus on understanding the mechanisms of iron uptake and redistribution in plants. This understanding has afforded greater insight into altering the existing strategies to achieve this goal. Approaches such as crop and mutation breeding, as well as transgenic technologies, have been used for the introduction of useful traits via genome manipulation. Also, a newly emergent area of study concerns the interaction of rhizosphere microbiota with plant roots and their effects on iron acquisition by plants. In this chapter, we have attempted to summarize the impact of associated microbiota in iron acquisition in addition to the conventional and transgenic efforts toward phytofortification for the alleviation of iron deficiency anemia in the global populace, particularly the affected strata.