Reprogramming the Genetic Potential of Buckwheat: A Roadmap for Functional Trait Improvement and Breeder-Ready...

With a burgeoning world population, unfettered urbanization, and the consequently associated pressure on the production of adequate food to sustain an ever-expanding human race, it is imperative to focus on finding simple and sustainable solutions to the present threat of global food insecurity. Besides staple food crops such as wheat, rice, and maize, there is an urgent need for production, promotion, marketing, and consumption of nutrition-dense, climate-resilient, economically viable, and locally available underutilized crops to ensure nutritional security. Within this milieu, buckwheat is a potential future crop owing to its nutritionally dense character, including the presence of its high-biological value protein with a balanced amino acid composition and flavonoids such as rutin, vitexin, quercetin, isovitexin, and isoorientin. Because buckwheat has strong adaptability to grow in a wide range of extreme environments and has a nutritionally dense profile, it has gained considerable interest among scientific communities for its role in the mitigation of nutritional insecurity by increasing agricultural diversification and minimizing environmental degradation. Owing to the presence of various bioactive constituents, crop-specific traits, and physiological responses, buckwheat research has seen significant advances in the context of the development of functional foods from this crop. Although buckwheat is considered as a healthy food because of its nutraceutical properties, low yields due to seed shattering because of pedicel breaking and heterozygosity due to self-incompatibility as a consequence of dimorphic heterostylism have always remained major problems in achieving large-scale incorporation of common buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) in the agricultural portfolio. The present review aims to address the current state of our knowledge on these issues and develop genome-based pipelines and prediction models that would help construct a roadmap for accelerating the domestication of buckwheat to bridge the "Food-nutrition gap".