Current progress and prospect of crop quality research

The industrialization of high-quality crops can help to increase the affordability of healthy diets for residents, and it is crucial to ensure food security and a better life. Quality traits are complex agronomic traits influenced by environment and regulated by multiple genes, whose basis is metabolism. Crops directly or indirectly provide energy and diversified nutrients for human beings through coordinated and orderly primary and/or secondary metabolism of photosynthates. Currently, several major genes responsible for nutrition, taste and other qualities have been cloned, and remarkable progress has been made in the analysis of metabolic pathways of vitamins and some special functional substances such as anthocyanins, and in the molecular design breeding of high-quality crops. However, our understanding of the regulatory mechanism of quality traits is limited, and the knowledge of environmental variation of quality traits is still lacking. Here, we summarized the present quality research on rice, wheat, corn and soybean at home and abroad, discussed the future development trend and bottleneck of quality research in China, and put forward some thoughts for crop quality research in China toward 2035.