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Feeding the extra billions: strategies to improve crops and enhance future food security

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Abstract

The ability to feed an expanding world population poses one of the greatest challenges to mankind in the future. Accompanying the increased demand for food by the expected nine billion inhabitants of Earth in 2050 will be a continual decrease in arable land area, together with a decline in crop yield due to a variety of stresses. For these formidable challenges to be met, future crops should not only by high-yielding, but also stress-tolerant and disease-resistant. In this review, we highlight the importance of genetic engineering as an indispensable tool to generate just such future crops. We briefly discuss strategies and available tools for biotechnological crop improvement and identify selected examples of candidate genes that may be manipulated so that current biological maxima in yield may be surpassed by comfortable margins. Future prospects and the necessity for basic research aimed at identifying novel target genes are also discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117543, Singapore

    Petra Stamm, Rengasamy Ramamoorthy & Prakash P. Kumar

  2. Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, National University of Singapore, 1 Research Link, Singapore, 117604, Singapore

    Prakash P. Kumar

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  1. Petra Stamm
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  2. Rengasamy Ramamoorthy
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  3. Prakash P. Kumar
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Correspondence to Prakash P. Kumar.

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P. Stamm and R. Ramamoorthy contributed equally to this work.

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Stamm, P., Ramamoorthy, R. & Kumar, P.P. Feeding the extra billions: strategies to improve crops and enhance future food security. Plant Biotechnol Rep 5, 107–120 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11816-011-0169-0

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