CoPIs: Edgar Cahoon and Etsuko Moriyama (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Chaofu Lu (Montana State University), Jorg Schwender and John Shanklin (SUNY, Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory), and Jay Thelen (University of Missouri-Columbia).
The discoveries that result from this basic research project will yield an understanding of the underlying principles of how pathways evolved for the synthesis of novel seed oils. The knowledge from this project may enable the design of a new generation of specialty crops that will become the green factories of the future through biotechnology. This project will support numerous, interdisciplinary educational opportunities for young scientists, graduate and undergraduate students. A video "Plant Oils Uncovered" along with interactive science experiments will be produced for secondary school students detailing the major role plant oils play in their life and in society. Undergraduate students, including those from minority groups, will participate in multi-disciplinary research projects that bring plant genomics together with biochemistry to solve complex but exciting challenges. Information and results will be available to the public through the project website at http://bioinfolab.unl.edu/oilseeds. All sequences generated in this project will be accessible through long-term repositories such as GenBank, the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), and the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). Proteomic data will be accessible through public proteomics databases, the Plant Protein Phosphorylation Database, PRIDE, and through iPlant.
The goal of this project is to make fundamental discoveries about metabolic networks that govern the accumulation of modified fatty acids, which occur in a wide range of plant species with hundreds of diverse chemical structures. Evolution of new enzyme functions, together with the co-evolution of additional biochemical and cell biological traits, has provided hundreds of potentially useful chemicals in seed oils, including the hydroxylated, conjugated and cyclopropane fatty acids to be studied in this project. This consortium will integrate genomics, proteomics and mathematical modeling to provide a transformative understanding about the accumulation of modified fatty acids in plants using three approaches: a) comparative genomics and proteomics to identify pathway and regulatory components required; b) enzyme assays and mathematical modeling to define the pathways for synthesis and storage of modified fatty acids; and, c) using the knowledge generated to reconstruct the pathways in Camelina, a crop targeted for industrial oil production.
