Abstract
Vegetable oil is an important renewable resource for dietary consumption for human and livestock, and more recently for biodiesel production. Lipid traits in crops are controlled by multiple quantitative trait loci (QTLs) and each of them has a small effect on lipid traits. So far, there is limited success to increase lipid yield and improve lipid quality in plants. Here, we reported the identification of a homolog of APETALA2 (AP2) transcription factor WRINKLED1 (JcWRI1) from an oleaginous plant Jatropha curcas and characterized its function in Jatropha and Arabidopsis thaliana. Using physical mapping data, we located JcWRI1 in a QTL region specifying high oleate and lipid content in Jatropha. Overexpression of JcWRI1 in Jatropha elevated seed lipid content and increased seed mass. Lipid profile in seeds of over-expression plants showed higher oleate content which will be beneficial to improve biodiesel quality. Overexpression of JcWRI1 activated lipid-related gene expression and JcWRI1 was shown to directly bind to the AW-box of promoters of some of these genes. In conclusion, we were able to increase seed lipid content and improve seed lipid quality in Jatropha by manipulating one key transcription factor JcWRI1.
Highlights
Increasing global population and emerging economies have led to the increased consumption of vegetable oil and disturbed the balance between use of edible lipids and industrial lipids (Carroll and Somerville, 2008)
There was a significant difference in seed lipid between J. curcas and J. integerrima, a kind of plant which was affiliated to the same family as J. curcas
Seeds of J. integerrima only accounted for 30% of the whole dry fruit whereas lipid content was 7.4% based on dry fruit weight
Summary
Increasing global population and emerging economies have led to the increased consumption of vegetable oil and disturbed the balance between use of edible lipids and industrial lipids (Carroll and Somerville, 2008). JcWRI1 Regulates Seed Lipid Content using breeding programs to increase seed yield and employed transgenic technologies to enhance agronomic traits in recent years, but the seed yield per Jatropha plant still requires much improvement for this energy crop to become competitive especially under market condition of low crude lipid price (Johnson et al, 2011). Vegetable lipid traits including yield and quality are determined by many QTLs that are regions of DNA contributing to particular phenotypes (Zheng et al, 2008; King et al, 2015). Other than Arabidopsis, little advance has been made in the biotechnological improvements of lipid content in oleaginous crops such as rapeseed, soybean, and peanut. There are significant differences in the complexity and regulation of lipid biosynthesis between model plants and oleaginous crops (Durrett et al, 2008). Manipulation of a single biochemical step, such as that catalyzed by acyl-CoA:diacylglycerol acyltransferase, a bottleneck enzyme, has been proven to be of limited efficacy to upregulate the entire lipid synthesis pathway; such manipulation often leads to weak or even no impact on lipid yield (Burgal et al, 2008)
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