Improving Oil Accumulation in Seed and Leaf

Date

Tuesday 21 June 2016

Time

12:30-13:30

Venue

CSIRO Black Mountain B1 Lecture Theatre

Speaker

Dr. Anna El Tahchy CSIRO Agriculture, ACT

Synopsis

Worldwide demand for vegetable oil is projected to double within the next thirty years due to increasing food, fuel and industrial requirements. There is therefore great interest in metabolic engineering strategies that boosts oil accumulation in plants. Here we describe a series of transient and stable gene expression in seed and in leaf. First, we stably transformed the Mus musculus Monoacylglycerol acyltransferase (MGAT2) in Arabidopsis thaliana that significantly increased lipid content in seed by 1.32 fold over the control. However, there are limitations on arable land and other inputs that are preventing the production from meeting this additional demand with current oilseed-based systems. Increasing the oil content of high biomass leaf tissue represents a potential new source of vegetable oil. Therefore, we generated a high leaf oil Nicotiana benthamiana (31.4 % by dry weight), by stably expressing WRI1, DGAT1 and OLEOSIN. We also demonstrated that A. thaliana thioesterases (FATA1, FATA2, and FATB) further increased the oil content. Finally, biochemical and lipid assays indicated that overexpression of these thioesterases increased the export of fatty acids and modified the oil profile of the accumulated oil.