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Towards oilcane: preliminary field evaluation of metabolically engineered sugarcane with hyper-accumulation of triacylglycerol in vegetative tissues

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Abstract

We recently generated oilcane, a metabolically engineered sugarcane with hyper-accumulation of energy dense triacylglycerol in vegetative tissues. Refinement of this strategy in high biomass crops like sugarcane may result in elevated lipid yields that exceed traditional oilseed crops for biodiesel production. This is the first report of agronomic performance, stable co-expression of lipogenic factors, and TAG accumulation in transgenic sugarcane under field conditions. Co-expression of WRI1; DGAT1, OLE1, and RNAi suppression of PXA1 was stable during the 2-year field evaluation and resulted in TAG accumulation up to 4.4% of leaf DW. This TAG accumulation was 70-fold higher than in non-transgenic sugarcane and more than 2-fold higher than previously reported for the same line under greenhouse conditions. TAG accumulation correlated highest with the expression of WRI1. However, constitutive expression of WRI1 was negatively correlated with biomass accumulation. Transgenic lines without WRI1 expression accumulated TAG up to 1.6% of leaf DW and displayed no biomass yield penalty in the plant cane. These findings confirm sugarcane as a promising platform for the production of vegetative lipids and will be used to inform strategies to maximize future biomass and lipid yields. The main conclusion is that constitutive expression of WRI1 in combination with additional lipogenic factors (DGAT1-2, OLE1, PXA1) in sugarcane under field conditions leads to hyper-accumulation of TAG and reduces biomass yield.

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Fig. 1
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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

The information, data, or work presented herein were funded in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), US Department of Energy, under Award Number DE-AR0000206. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the US Government or any agency thereof. This work was also supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Hatch project 1020425.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Agronomy Department, Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Program, Genetics Institute, University of Florida, IFAS, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Baskaran Kannan & Fredy Altpeter

  2. Biosciences Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, Brookhaven, NY, USA

    Hui Liu & John Shanklin

Authors
  1. Baskaran Kannan
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  2. Hui Liu
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  3. John Shanklin
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  4. Fredy Altpeter
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Contributions

F. A. and J. S. conceived and designed the experiments; F. A. and B. K. coordinated the propagation, planting, and evaluation of the transgenic plants in the greenhouse and field. B. K. collected the samples for TAG and qRT-PCR analysis, and collected the data for the evaluation of the agronomic performance and carried out qRT-PCR and statistical analysis; H. L. conducted the analyses of TAG. B. K. and F. A. wrote the manuscript. All the authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to John Shanklin or Fredy Altpeter.

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The research on transgenic energy cane was carried out in compliance with relevant institutional and national guidelines.

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Kannan, B., Liu, H., Shanklin, J. et al. Towards oilcane: preliminary field evaluation of metabolically engineered sugarcane with hyper-accumulation of triacylglycerol in vegetative tissues. Mol Breeding 42, 64 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11032-022-01333-5

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