RESEARCH-PGR: Discovering new metabolic constraints and regulatory nodes in oilseeds engineered for enhanced fatty acid synthesis and seed oil

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Plant oils are a renewable source of food, fuels, and chemicals; world output of plant oils must double by 2030 to meet projected demand. A major source of plant oils comes from seeds. While research has yielded improvements in seed oil quantity and quality, there are tradeoffs for other seed attributes such as protein content and yield. For example, plants that are bred or engineered to produce high seed oil often have decreased protein content or make fewer seeds. The molecular mechanism driving such tradeoffs remains unclear and creates a barrier for making improved crops with specific amounts of oil and protein content. This project seeks to unravel the genetic and molecular mechanisms related to the tradeoffs between oil, protein content, seed size, and seed set in order to enhance seed oil content of crops. By using an integrated approach, this project will investigate biochemical steps used by seeds to prioritize protein or oil production. Using this knowledge, this project will generate plants with improved seed oil production. In addition, this project promotes STEM education using the science of seed oils to train tomorrow's scientists as well as develops a science literacy program using hands-on research experience for students who are training to become future STEM teachers. The scientific and educational outcomes of this project will have broad impacts for both research and society through improved oil production in crop plants.Quantitative, comparative profiling of high-oil soybean, Camelina, and Arabidopsis will reveal the coordinated metabolic response to de-regulated de novo FAS. These findings will reveal the next metabolic constraint for engineering seed oil content, discover new genes involved in acyl lipid metabolism, and provide the plant lipid community with characterized, high-oil germplasm for gene stacking and comparative genomics. This project will integrate comparative transcriptomics, proteomics, and translatomics during three stages of seed development of FAS-engineered, high-oil plants to develop correlative and kinetic models to make metabolic predictions, and discover coregulated gene networks. Flux analyses and clustering models will be used to link high-oil germplasm to causal effects within combined central and lipid metabolic networks and used to make hypotheses for next-generation crop improvements. Aspects of in vivo FAS rates, the uncoupling of FAS from TAG synthesis that can lead to futile cycles of FAS and breakdown; and acyl fluxes through the lipid metabolic network will be investigated to elucidate new bottlenecks for TAG accumulation as a result of de-regulating FAS. Web resources (fatplants.net) developed as a part of this project will serve to educate the community and provide an interactive tool to integrate metabolism and gene regulation Integrated tools are necessary to inspire tomorrow's scientists and engineers and enable multidisciplinary training of all ages. This project will also develop a hands-on science literacy program for future educators of science and technology (Sci-FEST) and high school science teaching modules on plant metabolism and biotechnology will be created by the program participants.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.