Improving food nutritional quality and productivity through genetic engineering

Abstract

Genetic engineering has provided new tools for effectively ensuring food and nutritional security to improve agriculture across the world. Conventional agricultural practices can be assisted by molecular biology and biotechnology tools to develop crops with superior traits in a relatively fast way. Genetic engineering allowed solving important problems in many crops such as susceptibility to pests, diseases, environmental stress and development of crops with higher productivity and enhanced nutritional quality. Genetically-modified (GM) crops can prove to be powerful complements to those produced by conventional methods for meeting the worldwide demand for quality foods.