As the population of the world increases there will be increasing demands on natural resources. One solution to this problem will be to use plants as 'Green Factories' to produce specific renewable resources. Advances in genetic engineering have resulted in routine methods for the introduction of genes into crop plants. Previous efforts have focussed on the transfer of existing genes into plants to tailor plant storage compounds. This will free metabolic engineers from the constraints imposed by the existing variation of natural enzymes and will present a major step towards the engineering of desired storage compounds.
Lipids are one of the functional components of all living things.
Despite their importance, the details of lipid synthesis and modification are incomplete. Lipids are first synthesized as saturated fatty acids and double bonds are incorporated post-synthetically by enzymes known as fatty acid desaturases. Desaturation of a fatty acid produces dramatic effects on the physical properties of both cell membranes and storage lipids. We are also investigating a series of positional and chain length specific isoforms of this enzyme in order to determine the structural basis of these differences. We are in the process of engineering desaturase enzymes with desired specificities.