Oilseed crops as integrated production platforms for food, feed, fuel and renewable industrial feedstock

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. Examples of crops successfully engineered at Rothamsted for food, feed and industrial applications will be presented.

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. Examples of traits with potential for bio-refining that can be harvested as co-products in seeds, but also in non-harvested biomass will be discussed.

Taken together, progress in plant biotechnology (GM and non-GM) has now made possible the development of multipurpose crops displaying optimised traits for both primary and secondary products. This will involve a synthetic biology approach to manipulating growth and development as well as to metabolic engineering allowing trait stacking in dedicated crop platforms engineered for maximised value and optimised production cost. Integrated utilisation of entire crops will grow in importance providing renewable resources for food, feed and nutrition but also green alternatives for manufacturing and energy production.

Host: Andrea Harper