Buckwheat has attracted considerable interest amongst the global scientific community due to its nutritional and pharmaceutical properties. It is a low input crop whose cultivation has persisted through centuries of civilization in almost every country where cereals were cultivated. The crop is an important source of rutin, an important flavonoid which is known to have cardioprotective, vasoprotective, antihypertensive, anti-inflammation, cytoprotective and anti-diabetic properties. Grains of buckwheat are a rich source of protein with a balanced amino acid composition, gluten free flour, dietary fibre, vitamins, resistant starch, phytosterols, fagopyrins, fagopyritols and phenolic compounds. Buckwheat is a short season crop which completes its life cycle in 70-90 days and can grow in wide range of environmental conditions including marginal lands and rocky, poorly tilled soils. The protein content in buckwheat flour is higher than in commonly used cereals such as rice, wheat, millet, sorghum and maize. Buckwheat grain protein is rich in lysine and arginine, which are generally limiting in other cereals. Because of a low Lys/ Arg and Met/Gly ratio, buckwheat protein has strong hypolipidemic activity. While 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 highlights the multicore potential of buckwheat as a super crop to meet the challenges of food and nutritional security.

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Carotenoids are mostly C40 terpenoids that participate in several important functions in plants including photosynthesis, responses to various forms of stress, signal transduction and photoprotection. While the antioxidant potential of carotenoids is of particular importance for human health, equally important is the role of β-carotene as the precursor for vitamin A in the human diet. Rice, which contributes upto 40% of dietary energy for mankind, contains very low level of β-carotene, thereby making it an important crop for enhancing β-carotene accumulation in its grains and consequently targeting vitamin A deficiency. Biosynthesis of carotenoids in the endosperm of white rice is blocked at the first enzymatic step wherein geranylgeranyl diphosphate is converted to phytoene by the action of phytoene synthase (PSY). Strategies aimed at enhancing β-carotene levels in the endosperm of white rice identified Narcissus pseudonarcissus (npPSY) and bacterial CRT1 as the regulators of the carotenoid biosynthetic pathway in rice. Besides transcriptional regulation of PSY, posttranscriptional regulation of PSY expression by OR gene, molecular synergism between ε-LCY and β-LCY and epigenetic control of CRITSO through SET DOMAIN containing protein appear to be the other regulatory nodes which regulate carotenoid biosynthesis and accumulation in rice grains. In this review, we elucidate a comprehensive and deeper understanding of the regulatory mechanisms of carotenoid metabolism in crops that will enable us to identify an effective tool to alleviate carotenoid content in rice grains.