Recent Advances to Enhance Nutritional Quality of Rice

The nutritional quality of rice is a major concern, along with the need to enhance productivity to feed the continuously growing population. Therefore, there is a requirement to breed high-yield rice varieties with improved nutritional quality that can help combat malnutrition, which affects global health. Undoubtedly, breeding approaches have played a significant role in increasing rice yield while enhancing its nutritional content, thereby meeting the demands for this crop. In addition to traditional breeding techniques, other recent approaches, such as genetic engineering, gene editing, omics methods, and agronomic practices, must also be employed to meet the nutritional needs of the current population. In this review, we offer detailed information on the development of nutritionally improved rice varieties through the enhancement of protein content, micro- and macro-nutrients, vitamins, and oil quality using genetic engineering approaches. We also identify QTLs associated with amino acids, proteins, and micro-nutrients in rice. Furthermore, omics approaches provide a range of tools and techniques for effectively exploring resources and understanding the molecular mechanisms involved in trait development. Omics branches, including transcriptomics, proteomics, ionomics, and metabolomics, are efficiently utilized for improving rice nutrition. Therefore, by utilizing the information obtained from these techniques and incorporating all of these recent approaches, we can effectively modify the rice genome, directly enhancing the nutritional value of rice varieties. This will help address the challenges of malnutrition in the years to come.