Review highlights advances in producing very long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids in transgenic plants, suggesting sustainable alternatives to fish oil.
Very long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (VLCPUFAs) play important roles in human health. Dietary supplementation with VLCPUFAs can significantly alleviate the symptoms of many diseases. Currently, VLCPUFAs are mainly obtained from the oil of deep-sea fish. However, this source is considered insufficient and endangered because of the expanding market and environmental pollution. Exploiting sustainable and continuable alternative sources of fish oil is urgently needed. Because the biosynthetic pathway of VLCPUFAs has been elucidated and the genes of desaturases and elongases involved have been cloned, many researchers co-express such genes in plants to produce VLCPUFAs. This field is becoming cutting edge in metabolic engineering of oilseed plants. This review focuses on the latest progress in this area. The bottleneck in the biosynthetic pathway and methods of increasing the accumulation of VLCPUFAs are also discussed.
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Shi et al. (2007) studied this question.
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