Metabolic engineering of lipid metabolism by improving fatty
acid binding and transport Inventors: Florence Pojer, Joseph P.
Noel, Elise Larsen, Marianne Bowman, Stephane Richard Potential
Uses: Plant Biology, Transgenic Animals, Natural Products
Metabolic pathway engineering of lipids in plants; protein
crystallography and design. In addition to their importance in
human nutrition, plant fatty acids, or vegetable oils, are major
ingredients of nonfood products such as soaps, detergents,
lubricants, biofuels, cosmetics, and paints. With the
accelerating costs of petroleum, vegetable oils provide an
increasingly cost-effective alternate source for raw materials.
Yet, though selecting plants for increased oil production by
classical methods has been ongoing for at least a century, it
has proved difficult and complex to determine trait-genotype
associations for this seemingly simple trait. In plants, the
majority of fatty acids are biosynthesized in the plastid.
Nearly all aspects of fatty acid metabolism in pla