Engineering oilseeds for sustainable production of industrial and nutritional feedstocks: solving bottlenecks in fatty acid flux

Authors: Cahoon, Edgar; Shockey, Jay; Dietrich, Charles; Dyer, John

Submitted to: Current Opinion in Plant Biology
Publication Type: Review Article
Publication Acceptance Date: 4/16/2007
Publication Date: 6/1/2007
Citation: Cahoon, E.B., Shockey, J.M., Dietrich, C.R., Dyer, J.M. 2007. Engineering oilseeds for sustainable production of industrial and nutritional feedstocks: solving bottlenecks in fatty acid flux. Current Opinion in Plant Biology. 10:236-244.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Vegetable oils provide a platform for the production of high-value fatty acids that can replace non-sustainable petroleum and oceanic sources of specialty chemicals and aquaculture feed. Recent efforts to engineer seeds of crop and model species to produce new types of fatty acid structures for these uses have met with encouraging, but only modest success. These studies have included research to produce seed oils that contain hydroxy and conjugated fatty acids for industrial uses and long-chain omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids for farmed fish feeds. The collective results from these studies point to an inability of seeds from the engineered host plant to maintain efficient or selective flux of unusual fatty acids between different substrate pools and ultimately into storage in triacylglycerol (TAG). Evidence is emerging that diacylglycerol acyltransferase 2, which catalyzes the final step in TAG assembly, is an important contributor to the synthesis of many unusual fatty acid-containing oils and will likely be a key target for future oilseed metabolic engineering efforts.