CSIRO Plant Industry, Canberra, ACT, Australia.
Plant Biotechnol J. 2013 Feb;11(2):197-210. doi: 10.1111/pbi.12023. Epub 2012 Nov 29.
Society has come to rely heavily on mineral oil for both energy and petrochemical needs. Plant lipids are uniquely suited to serve as a renewable source of high-value fatty acids for use as chemical feedstocks and as a substitute for current petrochemicals. Despite the broad variety of acyl structures encountered in nature and the cloning of many genes involved in their biosynthesis, attempts at engineering economic levels of specialty industrial fatty acids in major oilseed crops have so far met with only limited success. Much of the progress has been hampered by an incomplete knowledge of the fatty acid biosynthesis and accumulation pathways. This review covers new insights based on metabolic flux and reverse engineering studies that have changed our view of plant oil synthesis from a mostly linear process to instead an intricate network with acyl fluxes differing between plant species. These insights are leading to new strategies for high-level production of industrial fatty acids and waxes. Furthermore, progress in increasing the levels of oil and wax structures in storage and vegetative tissues has the potential to yield novel lipid production platforms. The challenge and opportunity for the next decade will be to marry these technologies when engineering current and new crops for the sustainable production of oil and wax feedstocks.
社会在能源和石化需求方面严重依赖矿物油。植物油脂是一种独特的可再生资源，可以作为高价值脂肪酸的原料，用于化工原料，并替代当前的石化产品。尽管自然界中存在广泛的酰基结构，并且克隆了许多参与其生物合成的基因，但迄今为止，在主要油料作物中工程化经济水平的特种工业脂肪酸的尝试仅取得了有限的成功。由于对脂肪酸生物合成和积累途径的了解不完整，大部分进展都受到了阻碍。这篇综述基于代谢通量和反向工程研究提供了新的见解，这些见解改变了我们对植物油脂合成的看法，从一个主要的线性过程转变为一个复杂的网络，其中酰基通量在不同的植物物种之间有所不同。这些见解正在为工业脂肪酸和蜡的高水平生产带来新的策略。此外，在提高储存和营养组织中油脂和蜡结构水平方面取得的进展，有可能产生新的脂质生产平台。未来十年的挑战和机遇将是在为可持续生产油和蜡原料而对现有和新作物进行工程化时，结合这些技术。
