Grace Chen
Agricultural Research Service, USA
Title: Application of genomic tools for Lesquerella crop improvement
Biography
Biography: Grace Chen
Abstract
Lesquerella, a potential new industrial oilseed crop is valued for its unusual hydroxy fatty acid (20:1 OH) which can be used as raw materials for numerous industrial products, such as lubricants, plasticizers and surfactants. As a step towards genetic engineering of Lesquerella, we explored a Lesquerella seed transcriptome that generated 651 mega bases of raw sequences, 59,914 transcripts and 26,995 unique genes. These unique genes were found to represent all known seed expressed genes. Based on Arabidopsis acyl-lipid metabolism database, we identified 615 Lesquerella genes for all known pathways in acyl-lipid metabolism. Using quantitative real-time PCR assays, we characterized the expression profiles of 15 key genes involved in oil biosynthesis in various tissues of Lesquerella. Our results provide critical information for future design of genetic engineering experiments to control HFA production in plants.