Folates are essential vitamins in the human diet. Folate deficiency is still very common, provoking disorders such as birth defects and anemia. Biofortification via metabolic engineering is a proven powerful means to alleviate folate malnutrition. A variety of metabolic engineering approaches have been successfully implemented in different crops and tissues. Furthermore, ensuring folate stability is crucial for long-term storage of crop products. However, the current strategies, shown to be successful in rice and tomato, will need to be fine-tuned to enable adequate biofortification of other staples such as potato, wheat and cassava. Thus, there is a need to overcome remaining hurdles in folate biofortification. Overall, biofortification, via breeding or metabolic engineering, will be imperative to effectively combat folate deficiency.
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