Abstract
The world faces considerable challenges including how to produce more biomass for food, feed, fuel and industrial feedstock without significantly impacting on our environment or increasing our consumption of limited resources such as water or petroleum-derived carbon. This has been described as sustainable intensification. Oleaginous crops have the potential to provide renewable resources for all these commodities, provided they can be engineered to meet end-use requirements, and that they can be produced on sufficient scale to meet current growing world population and industrial demand. Although traditional breeding methods have been used successfully to modify the fatty acid composition of oils, metabolic engineering provides a more rapid and direct method for manipulating plant lipid composition. Recent advances in our understanding of the biochemical mechanisms of seed oil biogenesis and the cloning of genes involved in fatty acid and oil metabolic pathways, have allowed the generation of oilseed crops that produce ‘designer oils’ tailored for specific applications and the conversion of high biomass crops into novel oleaginous crops. However, improvement of complex quantitative traits in oilseed crops remains more challenging as the underlying genetic determinants are still poorly understood. Technological advances in sequencing and computing have allowed the development of an association genetics method applicable to crops with complex genomes. Associative transcriptomics approaches and high throughput lipidomic profiling can be used to identify the genetic components controlling quantitative variation for lipid related traits in polyploid crops like oilseed rape and provide molecular tools for marker assisted breeding. In this review we are citing examples of traits with potential for bio-refining that can be harvested as co-products in seeds, but also in non-harvested biomass.
Highlights
Global oilseed production is of the order of 450 Mt/year, with that figure predicted to rise to 500 Mt by 2020 (OECD-FAO data)
Erucic acid is currently mainly derived from high erucic acid rapeseed (HEAR with ∼50% 22:1 in seed oil) which were obtained by conventional breeding
Crambe does not outcross with conventional oilseed crops, is already commercially cultivated on a small scale, and novel varieties can yield the same amount of oil per hectare as spring oilseed rape suggesting that genetically modified crambe could be adopted in regular agricultural practice
Summary
Global oilseed production is of the order of 450 Mt/year, with that figure predicted to rise to 500 Mt by 2020 (OECD-FAO data). As the human population continues to increase, and historical patterns of consumption are changed and expanded as a consequence of increased economic affluence, the need for even greater levels of oilseeds and renewable oil is inexorable This situation is complicated by both regional aspects of different oilseed crops (in terms of agronomy, processing and end-user supply chain) and more global fluctuation in demands for a given specific vegetable oil. There is the continued dilemma of having a finite amount of land available for agriculture, with the added complication of the ongoing “food versus fuel” debate of how best to use this limited resource All of these factors point towards the need for more efficient production of crops, delivered in tandem with optimised traits for both primary and co-products.
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