The manipulation of seed oil content via transgene insertion was one of the early successful applications of modern biotechnology in agriculture. Indeed, the first transgenic crop with a modified seed composition to be approved for unrestricted commercial cultivation in the USA was a lauric acid rapeseed grown in 1995. The early successes in producing modified seed oils have more recently been tempered by a growing realization of the complexity of the biochemical pathways involved in plant lipid biosynthesis. In this presentation, I will examine the latest state-of-the-art for the production of improved oil crops using gene transfer techniques. This will include an account of the considerable recent progress in the isolation of genes responsible for the many biosynthetic steps of lipid metabolism. I will also review some of the unexpected consequences of such gene transfers ranging from phenotypic instability to the breakdown rather than the accumulation of the desired product. The option of gene transfer to existing crops will then be compared with a second option which is to domesticate new oil crop species that already make large amounts of useful edible or non-edible oils. Although previously regarded as an extremely long-term proposition, recent advances in the application of genomics and molecular marker-assisted selection may make domestication a viable alternative to gene transfer in the future. Our long-term vision is the cultivation of both new and improved oil crop species to act as “green” factories that produce a wide range of renewable, environmentally friendly, and edible industrial raw materials.
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