Researchers have discovered a brand new mechanism of oil biosynthesis and located a method to genetically engineer a style of test plant to more efficiently produce different sorts of seed oil that it otherwise would not make.
While the engineering is proof-of-concept, this discovery may lead to improved production of invaluable oils utilized in food and by a variety of industries. The study, led by Washington State University researchers, was published within the journal Nature Communications.
“Scientists have been working on producing novel seed oil compositions for many years, but more often than not you simply get small amounts of the specified oil,” said Phil Bates, a WSU professor and lead creator on the study.
Bates and his co-authors found that Physaria fendleri, a plant related to canola, can naturally change the fatty acid composition in its seed oil after it’s already made, something no person knew any plant could do. They found the genetic mechanism Physaria uses to makes those changes, then genetically engineered a related plant called Arabidopsis to make the identical fatty acid changes.
The modified Arabidopsis overcame metabolic bottlenecks and produced significant amounts of an oil much like castor oil that it doesn’t naturally produce.
Plant oils are utilized in food, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, industrial, chemical and biofuel industries. Plant oils’ value stems from its fatty acid composition. Around 90% of oil is invaluable for industrial uses in crops like castor beans, Bates said. But when the desirable oil-making genes are transferred into one other plant, only small amounts of the oil produced is usable by industry. The newly discovered mechanism of oil biosynthesis shows a method to bump that production back up.
“We have all the time thought that when plants accumulate oil during seed development, that is the tip product,” said Bates, a college member in WSU’s Institute of Biological Chemistry. “But we found that Physaria, after making oil, removes a few of the fatty acids inside the oil and replaces that with others.”
Those oils could replace the reliance of growing dangerous crops, like castor. Castor plants are banned within the U.S. because additionally they produce ricin, a dangerous poison. Castor oil is invaluable in industrial lubricants, but expensive because only a number of nations can grow the plants, either legally or environmentally.
“We will use this latest biosynthetic process as a tool to alter oil composition,” Bates said. “We’re at the place to begin of putting this into crop plants. We would like to eventually produce healthy fatty acids beyond industrial uses.”
Bates and his colleagues are also other plants to see in the event that they do similar remodeling of oils after production.
“We have not identified any others yet, but we have never looked before,” Bates said. “This can be a latest discovery that no person knew plants could do. We would like to see if common crop plants, like canola, can do that remodeling as well.”
Other potential uses for this process include food for people and biofuels, especially aviation fuel.
The project was a collaboration between Bates lab and the Smertenko lab each within the Institute of Biological Chemistry at WSU in addition to two labs from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Funding for work on this paper got here from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, National Science Foundation and the U. S. Department of Energy.
