Reconfiguring biofortification strategies to transform food systems and address micronutrient deficiency of the 21st century

Despite achieving substantial progress in caloric food security, micronutrient deficiencies remain a major global health challenge, highlighting a persistent disconnect between crop productivity and nutritional quality. Crop biofortification has emerged as a promising strategy to address this gap by enhancing the intrinsic nutrient content of widely consumed foods to meet dietary requirements through complementary roles of staple crops and horticultural species in improving diet quality. In this review, we reposition biofortification within a broader nutrition-sensitive food system framework and discuss two complementary approaches to accelerate its impact. First, we examine how systematic exploration of global crop diversity can identify nutritionally superior germplasm from seed/genebanks for deployment in breeding and food systems. Second, we evaluate advances in modern breeding and genome-editing approaches for improving minerals, vitamins, and health-promoting phytochemicals across major crop groups. We further propose that a conserved set of nutrient-regulatory pathways provides a unifying framework for cross-crop biofortification, enabling more efficient, scalable strategies to enhance multiple nutritional traits to support a transition toward crop portfolios designed not only for yield and resilience but also for improved human health in the 21st century.