Reviews & Analysis

Crop microbiomes provide plants with beneficial functions including increased nutrient acquisition and stress tolerance, but the current capability of utilizing indigenous crop microbiomes is limited due to low efficiency of separating the targeted functional microbes. A newly proposed framework using single-cell-sorting Raman spectroscopy combined with a synthetic community approach has the potential to design and optimize a ‘beneficial biome’.

Publicly funded technological innovations, strategic policy implementation and private sector upscaling have facilitated greater demand and lower costs for certain foods in the past. Can lessons be learned for transitioning towards healthy, sustainable diets?

Agriculture is the main contributor to global water scarcity but not all diets contribute equally. Modifying what, and how much, we eat could reduce the impact of our diets on global water resources.

Food contains thousands of different trace natural compounds, many of which remain largely unmeasured and undocumented. The network medicine approach sheds new light on how polyphenols, among the most important of these trace compounds, impact human health.

An assessment of global inequality in agriculture, food and health indicators between 1970–2010 reveals that significant progress has been made in some countries, but more is needed to achieve a truly equitable food system that delivers for the diets, nutrition and health of all people.

Transgenic maize for human consumption and livestock feed has the capacity to increase yields for a variety of farming operations in Africa and the potential to ensure food security in the face of climate change.

Without breakthroughs for adaptation, rising temperatures in the hottest wheat-producing environments, such as Sudan, could reduce domestic production, increase dependency on imports and threaten food security for millions.

A study of the grain trade during 2020 indicates that policies to protect supply chains must be enacted to avoid supply chain shocks such as COVID-19 and locust swarms exacerbating food insecurity in global regions that rely on food imports.

Understanding of the effects of elevated CO₂ on crops has improved sufficiently that modelling future climatic effects on agriculture should eliminate ‘no CO₂’ simulations. Further advancement in the estimation of the effects can be realized by studying a wider variety of crop species under a wider range of growing conditions, improving the representation of responses to climate extremes in crop models and simulating additional crop physiological processes related to nutritional quality.

Effects of national policies on crop yield and nitrogen losses can be disentangled from environmental conditions using spatial discontinuities between international borders.

Climate change increases the frequency and severity of drought in many agricultural regions. A novel big-data approach has been designed to shed light on the interactions between agronomic and environmental factors affecting the sensitivity of crop yields to drought.

Aquaculture must develop within planetary boundaries. Experience from agriculture, such as in managing monocultures and using genetically modified crops, can inform sustainable solutions for aquaculture.

An assessment of the climate vulnerability of the UK’s fruit and vegetable supply is a useful starting point for considering the health, environment, and social trade-offs of international trade in food.

Traceability is key to food quality and safety, but its wider implementation is hindered by high costs and technical complexity. A newly proposed mobile-based bidirectional system based on information concatenation through products’ 2D barcodes offers an effective, cheaper and more flexible alternative.

A series of in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo studies show that starch structure and plant tissue intactness control glucose release from pea-based foods. Modification of these characteristics through plant breeding and food processing may provide opportunities for enhanced food formulation, but challenges for labelling and communication.

Feeding infants with formula requires heating water and bottles for sterilization and formula preparation. Plastic infant feeding bottles are commonly used, and now their potential to release microplastics has been explored at a global scale.

Farm management strategies for alternatives to nitrogen application can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve air quality, and increase crop yields in China.

The diversity of aquaculture production systems in Bangladesh may be calibrated to provide food and nutrition security without negative environmental impact, aligning multiple interests of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

India’s domestic food production is capable of supplying adequate micronutrients to its growing population in spite of water and land constraints, but achieving this will require a shift away from the current focus on rice and wheat and towards vegetables, fruit and lentils.

Fusarium wilt, the most destructive and uncontrollable fungal disease affecting banana, has now become a global threat. This Perspective proposes complementary strategies for banana Fusarium wilt management, including revising agrosystems and precision breeding.