BBMB Research Seminars

September 28, 2007
Sten Stymne
Department of Plant Breeding and Biotechnology
Swedish university of Agricultural Sciences
"Genetic Engineered Vegetable Oils for Bio-materials and Bio-fuels: What? and When?"
1414 Molecular Biology Buidling
4:10 p.m.

Abstract:

Replacing fossil oil with sustainable alternatives is perhaps the most important and urgent challenge for the global society today. Vegetable oil is the agricultural product that chemically most resemble the fossil oil and therefore has the greatest potential to replace it both for fuel and for production of various chemicals and materials.

I will in this presentation go through some initiatives that are now taken to form a world-wide network of research to develop vegetable oil qualities and production systems through biotechnology, which will meet the future demands for an environmental, economical and social beneficial production of vegetable oils for both energy and the chemical industry. These initiatives are both taken both by individual scientists as well as in larger networks. The planned activities can be split into two different categories which eventually might merge.

1. Developing vegetable oil with fatty acids with novel functionalities for chemical industry. These qualities will,  in most cases, include novel fatty acid structures that are not present in todays oil crops which are used for food. In order to avoid out crossing  or unintentional mixing with food crops there is a need to develop a ‘safe’ industrial oil crop platform for the production of these qualities. There are a number of such platform crops for different regions in the world discussed, but there is a common agreement that Crambe abyssinica and Brasica carinata are  promising candidates. I will present the coming activities to develop  these crops for the production of various industrial oil qualities in the EC FW7 project ICON which, in addition the European partners, also include participants from Canada, China, Australian and US, including Iowa State University.

2. Biodiesel production. The energy output/input ratio of converting vegetable oils to biodiesel is far better than converting sugars (in form of starch, cellulose or sucrose) into ethanol. However, high yielding oil crops are limited in number and in Europe it is virtually only rape that is economically realistic to use today for biodiesel production. If the photosynthate in plants that now are efficient in producing cellulose, starch or sugar could be diverted to oil production instead, cost effective vegetable oil production for biodiesel on huge acreages, with low economic input and low environmental impacts, could be foreseen. Such a major change in plant metabolism is a great scientific challenge which require a systems biology approach. Nevertheless, we have today the tools to start to work towards such a goal and, as I will show, it might be feasible to achieve substantial oil production in certain starch crops in a relative short time frame.