Genomic approaches towards the engineering of oil seeds

With the advent of publicly available genomic information for the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, but also increasingly for crop species such as rice, maize, tomato or soybean, the genetic engineering of plants has entered a new area. Gene discovery and control of metabolism can now be approached on a global scale. The genome of A. thaliana has been fully deciphered and annotated, and many expressed sequence sets from specialized tissues and developmental stages of this plant are available. This model plant also produces oil rich seeds similar to Brassica crop species and therefore provides the ideal tools to develop genomic strategies that should be applicable to oil seed crops. These strategies include approaches towards oil property modification and increase of oil yields. More exotic species with certain seed oil qualities serve as rich resources for novel genes which can be easily explored in expressed sequence tag experiments of moderate scale.