Abstract
Camelina has emerged in the last decade as a multipurpose crop plant particularly suitable for engineering new lipids for diverse uses, including feed, biofuel and green chemistry. The rebirth of this ancient crop was based on several intrinsic favorable characteristics: robust agronomic qualities, attractive oil profile, genetic proximity with the model plant arabidopsis, ease of genetic transformation by floral dip. The need to increase both the production and diversity of plant oils, while improving the sustainability of agricultural systems, has been the driving forces behind the ever-increasing investment in camelina research. Worldwide interest in engineering camelina has led to the development of a remarkable pipeline that allows the rapid production and phenotyping of new lines; it includes specific tools, such as databases, collections of natural accessions, methods of genetic transformation and lipid analysis. Implementation of numerous metabolic pathways in camelina for the production of novel lipids has highlighted the potential as well as the versatility of this new old oilseed crop that is well on the way to becoming an ideal plant chassis for lipid synthetic biology.
Highlights
Worldwide production and distribution of plant oilseeds and their products have undergone remarkable expansion; the area devoted to growing oilseeds has expanded by 19%, while production has increased by 34% since 2005
The current situation of low petroleum prices suggests that growing camelina for biofuel is unlikely to be economically viable in the near future, but that other uses, and redesigning camelina oils to produce a variety of products including novel industrial feedstocks is a more realistic objective, and this will be the primary focus of this review
These results suggest that the likelihood of introgression of camelina transgenes in populations of Arabidopsis thaliana and Capsella bursa-pastoris is extremely low
Summary
Combining camelina’s very attractive agronomic traits with its unprecedented ease for genetic engineering, makes it an ideal plant chassis for biotechnology applications, in particular synthetic biology strategies (Napier et al, 2014; Vollmann and Eynck, 2015; Bansal and Durrett, 2016; Haslam et al, 2016) Since it remains a very minor crop in terms of human oil consumption, organizing co-existence should be easier than with the major oilseed food crops, such as rapeseed, soybean, or sunflower. During the 20th century, camelina continued to be cultivated on a small scale, essentially for production of oil for human consumption Because of this century of neglect, camelina has undergone relatively little improvement by plant breeders, and the currently grown cultivars can be considered to be quite primitive, and should benefit greatly from the combined efforts of plant breeding and advanced techniques of modern biotechnology as described below. The current situation of low petroleum prices suggests that growing camelina for biofuel is unlikely to be economically viable in the near future, but that other uses, and redesigning camelina oils to produce a variety of products including novel industrial feedstocks is a more realistic objective, and this will be the primary focus of this review
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
