Maize Nutraceutomics: Genomics, Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology

Abstract

Maize (Zea mays) is known as the queen of cereals because of its higher grain yield potential, wider adaptability, genetic diversity, use as food, feed, and industrial use among cereals. The growing population is a threat to nutritional security, and demand for a cost-effective and promising strategy for the food system. Every year around two billion of the world’s population is prone to malnutrition caused by essential micronutrients, proteins, and vitamins. Biofortification is one of the most promising approaches to enhance the nutritional quality of maize grains and reduce the risk of hidden hunger globally. Maize possesses several naturally existing mutants for nutritional quality traits and is considered as a model crop for biofortification. Effective utilization of recent advances in genomic, molecular tools, crop improvement techniques, machine learning, and artificial intelligence can pave the way in developing nutritionally rich maize. This chapter provides insight on the importance of maize in global nutritional food security, approaches for biofortification, genetic resources, and genetic diversity for nutritional quality traits, map-based gene cloning, trait mapping and finding major quantitative trait loci (QTLs), conventional and genomic-assisted breeding strategies for enhancing corn nutritional quality. Further this chapter emphasizes the genetic engineering approach, novel genome editing techniques, nanotechnology, and available bioinformatic databases to carry out omics research for designing nutritional rich maize.