Efficient breeding of high oleic rice cultivar by editing OsFAD2-1 via CRISPR/Cas9

Rice bran oil has superior nutritional value and biostability compared with other vegetable oils. However, due to its low content of oleic acid and high content of linoleic acid, its stability and shelf life are affected. Hence, regulating the levels of oleic acid and linoleic acid is crucial for enhancing the quality of rice bran oil.

To that end, a team of researchers from China used CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing to create OsFAD2-1 knockout rice mutants to develop rice seeds enriched in oleic acid. They reported their results in the Journal of Integrative Agriculture.

“The OsFAD2 gene converts oleic acid to linoleic acid in the plant polyunsaturated fatty acid synthesis pathway,” shares corresponding author Jie Yang, a professor at Jiangsu University. “To create loss-of-function OsFAD2-1 mutants, a guide RNA was explicitly designed to target the exon of the OsFAD2-1 gene.”

The OsFAD2-1 gene-edited mutants demonstrated a significant increase in oleic acid content and a decrease in linoleic acid levels. “This discovery aligns with previous findings in oilseed crops, confirming that OsFAD2 is critical in regulating fatty acid metabolism,” says Yang.

Notably, loss of OsFAD2 function not only weakens linoleic acid synthesis and increases oleic acid accumulation, but also lowers the activity of ω12-desaturase in seeds.

“Our study is the first to propose simultaneous improvement of both the oxidative stability of RBO and cooking quality (RVA properties) by editing the OsFAD2-1 gene,” adds Yang, “The potential of gene editing to improve rice quality was demonstrated by the edited lines’ increased nutritional value and stable agronomic traits.”

Overall, the findings provide a novel strategy for the design of functional rice cultivars. The authors noted that future studies should attempt to combine this technique with advanced breeding practices aiming for sustainable agriculture.

###

Contact the author: Yingying Wu, E-mail: m13863275949@163.com;

Correspondence Jie Yang, Tel: +86-25-84390320, E-mail: yangjie168@aliyun.com

The publisher KeAi was established by Elsevier and China Science Publishing & Media Ltd to unfold quality research globally. In 2013, our focus shifted to open access publishing. We now proudly publish more than 200 world-class, open access, English language journals, spanning all scientific disciplines. Many of these are titles we publish in partnership with prestigious societies and academic institutions, such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).