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(Brookhaven National Laboratory/EurekAlert!) Research solves longstanding problem and opens path for growing crops to produce industrially important high-value fatty acids Hundreds of naturally occurring specialty fatty acids (building blocks of oils) have potential for use as raw materials for making lubricants, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and more–if they could be produced at large scale by crop plants. But attempts to put genes for making these specialty building blocks into crops have had the opposite effect: Seeds from plants with genes added to make specialty fatty acids accumulated dramatically less oil. No one knew why.
Now two teams of biochemists working on separate aspects of oil synthesis at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have converged to discover the mechanism behind the oil-production slowdown. As described in the journal
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IMAGE: Biochemist Xiao-Hong Yu s research on specialty fatty acid production in plants got a boost from collaborating with colleagues studying an off-switch that regulates ordinary fatty acid synthesis. view more
Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory
UPTON, NY - Hundreds of naturally occurring specialty fatty acids (building blocks of oils) have potential for use as raw materials for making lubricants, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and more if they could be produced at large scale by crop plants. But attempts to put genes for making these specialty building blocks into crops have had the opposite effect: Seeds from plants with genes added to make specialty fatty acids accumulated dramatically less oil. No one knew why.