Genetic Technologies to Boost Crop Nutrition and Fight Hunger Under Climate Change
A review in Nature highlights how CRISPR-Cas and metabolic engineering can enhance crop nutritional density to combat global hidden hunger and climate stress.
On June 24, 2026, the scientific journal Nature (volume 654, pages 877–891) published a comprehensive review titled "Genetic technologies to enhance crop nutritional value under climate change." A distinguished international group of researchers, including Dominique Van Der Straeten, Mustafa Bulut, Da Cao, Asaph Aharoni, Howarth Bouis, Antonio Granell, Wilhelm Gruissem, Birger Lindberg Møller, Cathie Martin, Holger Puchta, Nese Sreenivasulu, Alain Tissier, Leena Tripathi, Marc Van Montagu, and Alisdair R. Fernie, collaborated on this paper. The study addresses a critical global challenge: currently, more than 700 million people live with caloric hunger, while over two billion suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, commonly referred to as "hidden hunger."
The authors emphasize that achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2, which aims for zero hunger, requires addressing three major agricultural objectives simultaneously. First, there must be an increase in overall crop yields to sustain the growing population. Second, crops must have a higher density of vitamins and minerals to satisfy the recommended daily dietary intake of the population, a process known as multi-biofortification. Third, plants must be equipped with enhanced resilience to climate change. Historically, the Green Revolution focused almost exclusively on boosting global calorie production, which unfortunately prioritized high crop yields over nutritional quality and consequently worsened hidden hunger.
This nutritional crisis is further compounded by modern environmental factors. Scientific evidence shows that stresses arising from global climate change directly reduce the density of several essential micronutrients in crops. In response to these challenges, CRISPR-Cas technology has emerged as a revolutionary breeding tool. Enabling genome editing with extremely high precision, this technology has already been officially adopted and integrated into breeding practices by many countries around the world to improve crop resilience and quality.
The review explores how CRISPR-Cas-based approaches can be deployed to meet specific biofortification targets by increasing micronutrient density in crops to levels that can alleviate dietary deficiencies. Given the urgent and limited timeframe available to achieve the UN zero hunger goals, the researchers advocate for a hybrid approach. They argue that CRISPR-Cas should be combined with traditional and advanced metabolic engineering methods, such as genetic transformation, to accelerate the development of highly nutritious crops.
Beyond existing metabolic pathways and current CRISPR-Cas methodologies, the study highlights untapped genomic resources that can be harnessed for crop micronutrient biofortification. The authors also present a schematic overview of the current legislative frameworks governing New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) and Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) on a per-continent basis. Ultimately, they call for the global adoption of these integrated genetic technologies to solve one of the most pressing societal and agricultural crises of the twenty-first century.