Genome-Edited Cereal Characterization Using Metabolomics

Worldwide cereals are the major source of nutrition due to their grains, which are a rich source of carbohydrates, protein, fats, minerals, and vitamins. In addition, their high fiber content helps to prevent several diseases. To feed the ever-increasing world population is a major challenge faced by the world today. Maintenance of a steady supply of staple foods with improved nutritional content and addressing climate change could be made possible by the application of modern breeding techniques. Currently, gene editing techniques are revolutionizing the field of biology by providing far greater precision. Genome editing is quite helpful in improving the range of crop traits such as nutritional quality, higher yield, improved grain quality, disease resistance, biotic and abiotic stress tolerance, optimal plant architecture, and safer products. Keeping in view the importance, gene editing techniques have been broadly used for cereal crop improvement. Furthermore, metabolomics could be a suitable effective tool for the comprehensive characterization of the metabolic profiles of these genetically edited crops if the challenges faced in characterizing these edited crops could be overcome. A combination of the latest analytical techniques with bioinformatics tools is quite helpful in providing detailed compositional data of these crops. Combining metabolomics with other high-throughput techniques such as transcriptomics and proteomics could be effective to meet such challenges.