A 'textbook' plant typically comprises about 85% water and 13.5% carbohydrates. The remaining fraction contains at least 14 mineral elements, without which plants would be unable to complete their life cycles.
Understanding plant nutrition and applying this knowledge is essential to increasing crop production to meet growing demands for food. Genotypic approaches, based on crop selection and / or breeding have recently begun to benefit from technological advances, including the completion of plant genome sequencing projects.
Plant Nutritional Genomics provides a timely overview of plant nutritional genomics, which is defined as the interaction between a plant's genome and its nutritional characteristics. Optimising mineral nutrition during crop production is vital to the development of healthy and nutritional pest and disease resistant crops without relying on chemical input. The judicious selection and breeding of fit-for-purpose varieties of crops will play a huge role in meeting these objectives, and advances in plant nutritional genomics will allow the full potential of crop selection and breeding strategies to be realized.