Production of technical oils in agricultural crops - Current situation and future outlook

The raw material supply of the chemical industry of today is to a great extent mineral oil based. This supply is approaching its peak and this brings the question of what to replace the mineral oil with, to the fore. Most seed oils, including oils from all our annual oil crops, consist of triacylglycerols (TAG) containing five dominating fatty acids: palmitic, stearic, oleic, linoleic and linolenic acids. In addition to these fatty acids, there are a great number of other fatty acids occurring in high amounts in seed oils from various wild plant species. Some of these more unusual fatty acids (uFA) have potential as raw material in the chemical industry. One alternative therefore, is to use vegetable oil as a renewable alternative to the petroleum-derived chemical feedstock. However, commercial production of seed oil from these wild species is hampered by high production costs due to low seed yield and general poor agricultural performance. Domestication of some of these wild species has been attempted. However, an attractive alternative is to produce these fatty acids at low cost in already high yielding oil crops by introduction of the fatty acid biosynthetic machinery from the wild plants by genetic engineering. I will present the current situation and some of our ongoing work in this area at the Department of Crop Science in Alnarp