Page 14 - S. Plant biology

[S. Plant biology-8]

Metabolic modification of arabidopsis, an oil model plant, to

produce hydroxy fatty acid for industrial applications

Mid-Eum Park¹, Hyun Uk Kim¹˙²

¹Molecular Biology, Sejong University, Seoul 05006, Republic of Korea, ²Bioindustry and Bioresource Engineering,

Sejong University, Seoul 05006, Republic of Korea

Castor (Ricinus communis L.) produces an unusual fatty acid, hydroxy fatty acid (HFA), in seeds. The HFA is used as
a chemical feedstock, including soaps, lubricants, and plastics. Although many researchers have tried to increase

HFA in Arabidopsis seeds as a model oil plant using RcFAH12 gene transformation, the results are not sufficient

compared to castor that has 80~90% of HFA in seed oil. We constructed the pCam5 vector that includes five HFA
biosynthesis-related genes (FAH12, DGAT2, PDAT1-2, PDCT, and LPCAT) from castor. The pCam5 transgenic lines
produce 25% HFA in T5 seed. But this increase is not enough, so the fatty acid elongase 1 (fae1) knockout mutant

was generated using CRISPR/Cas9 to increase 18:1 fatty acid substrate for FAH12 in pCam5 transgenic plants. The
mutation of fae1 in pCam5 transgenic lines produce the HFA up to 32%. To accumulate HFA more than 32%,

WRINKLED1 (WRI1) from castor were expressed in fae1 knockout pCam5 transgenic plants. The expression of castor
WRI1 gene resulted in accumulation of HFA up to 42% in T3 seed of T2 generation. In this study, we produced the

HFA up to 42% in Arabidopsis seed oil by knocking out of the FAE1 endogenous gene and expression of six castor
foreign genes, which is highest record in the present research.