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Food Lipids: Chemistry, Nutrition, and Biotechnology

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996 Knauf <strong>and</strong> Del Vecchio<br />

moreover, new lipid structures that take advantage of those fatty acid building blocks<br />

are also possible.<br />

The complexity <strong>and</strong> cost of practicing this technology <strong>and</strong> the concomitant<br />

planning imply a careful examination of the value <strong>and</strong> utility of the resulting vegetable<br />

oils before a genetic engineering project is begun. However, the potentially<br />

most exciting applications are those that create truly novel oils. Such oils typically<br />

do not have any extensive history of use in the food industry, <strong>and</strong> thus there are<br />

only small knowledge bases available to help predict value <strong>and</strong> utility of hypothetical<br />

oils. Certainly in the case of laurate canola, the significant performance improvements<br />

based on the unique triacylglycerol structure could not have been anticipated<br />

because that structure had not been predicted. Industry laboratories cannot justify<br />

spending resources to develop application for raw material vegetable oils they cannot<br />

obtain. Conversely, biotechnology companies will have trouble justifying the development<br />

of a novel oil if no industry group has demonstrated interest in buying that<br />

oil.<br />

There is a long history of working with the established <strong>and</strong> conventional vegetable<br />

oils such as soybean or cottonseed, <strong>and</strong> therefore a certain familiarity with<br />

how they can be used. When truly novel vegetable oil <strong>and</strong> fatty acid compositions<br />

are made available, a careful reexamination of the basic assumptions for how commodity<br />

vegetable oils are currently used will be worth while. Important new applications<br />

may be possible due to inherently novel chemical composition <strong>and</strong> structures<br />

of vegetable oils created by the modification of crop plant genes. This, then, is a<br />

major challenge to lipid chemists in all fields: to underst<strong>and</strong> the contributions of<br />

underlying composition <strong>and</strong> structure of oils to the eventual functionalities, <strong>and</strong> to<br />

use that underst<strong>and</strong>ing to intelligently predict the most advantageous uses of genetic<br />

engineering technology applied to vegetable oils.<br />

REFERENCES<br />

1. A. J. Del Vecchio. High-laurate canola. INFORM 7:230 (1996).<br />

2. V. C. Knauf. Progress in the cloning of genes for plant storage lipid biosynthesis. In:<br />

Genetic Engineering, Vol. 15 (J. K. Setlow, ed.). Plenum Press, New York, 1993, pp.<br />

149–164.<br />

3. V. C. Knauf. The application of genetic engineering of oilseed crops. Trends Biotechnol.<br />

5:40 (1987).<br />

4. R. Töpfer, N. Martini, <strong>and</strong> J. Schell. Modification of plant lipid biosynthesis. Science<br />

268:681 (1995).<br />

5. W. C. Willett. Diet <strong>and</strong> health: What should we eat? Science 264:532 (1994).<br />

Copyright 2002 by Marcel Dekker, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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