Green Engineering - knowledge-based delivery of sustainable products in plants: Harnessing endogenous pathways to enhance yield

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To address the increasing global demand for vegtable oils and the need for more sustainable agricultural systems we will engineer native metabolic and developmental processes to enhance oil yield in seeds and leaves. To achieve this we will use a range of genetic tools in addition to GM including natural variation mutagenesis and GE. Importantly the Government’s plan to relax the regulation of GE crops may provide us with new opportunities to improve crops for UK farmers. We will explore multiple routes for the improvement of metabolic and developmental seed traits that are components of oil yield. We aim to deliver these traits in oilseed rape (Brassica napus L.; OSR) the UK’s primary oilseed crop as part of a longer-term strategy to develop our existing portfolio of OSR work. To this end the RRes transformation unit has recently developed an OSR pipeline and we will collaborate with JIC to co-develop a unique UK-focused winter OSR (WOSR) genetic resource in WP1.1. This will be supported by an associated Brassica knowledge platform in W1.2. Where appropriate however we will use the boutique oilseed crop Camelina as a rapid route to testing genetic interventions in the field. Camelina benefits from good abiotic and biotic stress tolerance and can be widely grown both in Northern latitudes and arid areas. The relatively short generation time (< 3 months) and reference genome sequence are of great utility for genome engineering. Importantly Camelina does not out-cross to wild Brassicas and is unique amongst Brassica crops being readily transformed by Agrobacterium-mediated floral dip making it less prone to somaclonal variation and an effective fast-track crop for testing traits via GM as well as deploying GE approaches. In WP1.3 we will increase seed oil yield via targeted engineering approaches and will investigate approaches to increase oil content in vegetative tissues of forage species in WP1.4 to improve ruminant livestock productivity and reduce methane emissions.

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