Editorial: Regulation and manipulation of nutrient-controlling genes in crops

Agriculture, food, and health sectors are largely disconnected because little has been done to consider the complex relationship between agricultural production, food consumption, human nutrition, health, and the food supply chain. As society develops, a healthy diet has becoming increasingly important for humans. Unhealthy diets and nutritional imbalance are highly correlated with several common chronic diseases, such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers (Lee et al., 2011). The staples of a healthy diet usually come from crops, and the nutritional qualities of these crops, including the chemical composition of food crops, are essential considerations for a healthy diet. For example, the ratio between amylose and amylopectin in rice and the ratio between saturated and unsaturated fatty acids"”particularly the percentage of oleic acid"”are both related to human health (Goddard et al., 1984; Mozaffarian et al., 2006). Another major issue is the presence, or absence, of some nutritional components that are essential for human health, such as lysine in rice and tocopherol in the oils (Wang and Galili, 2016; Martin and Li, 2017). All of these require a better understanding of genetic regulation and the interaction between those genes encoding these traits (Martin and Li, 2017). This Research Topic focuses on the genetic control of important nutrients in crops, the identification of important QTLs combining large effective modern genetic tools such as GWAS analysis, multiple omics analysis on nutrients, gene-controlling nutrients function assays, and the manipulation of genes, such as gene transferring and genome editing. The aim of this Research Topic is to identify key genes and understand the genetic control of nutrients in order to provide healthy foods for humans. The Research Topic includes three original research articles, one systematic review, and one mini review on the subject of carbohydrate-containing and oil-bearing crops.