Boosting Production of Vegetable Oil.

• Position: PLANT BIOLOGY

Since antiquity, cultures around the world have been extracting vegetable oil from plants to use as food and fuel. Some vegetable oils have important health benefits, including lowering cholesterol levels and decreasing the risk of cardiovascular disease. There is a problem, though--vegetable oils traditionally are extracted from fruits or seeds, and the extraction process often leads to the rest of the plant being discarded in the process.

Now, Jay Thelen, professor of biochemistry at the University of Missouri, Columbia, has found a way to boost the production of triacylglycerol--the main component of vegetable oil--in plant leaves, a technique that could allow producers to harvest oil from large, leafy plants that also have other uses. Sorghum, for example--a global source of grain prized for its drought-resistant qualities--could serve a dual role as a source of vegetable oil, creating a more efficient and valuable crop.

Thelen and Yajin Ye, a postdoctoral fellow in Thelen's lab, used the gene editing tool CRISPR--clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats--to "knock out" a family of genes they have found to be responsible for...