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AssigneeWashington State University
InventorsJohn A. Browse, Chaofu Lu, Zhanguo Xin
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Aspects of the invention provide methods for differential regulation of fatty acid unsaturation in seed oil and membrane lipids of plants based on modulation of a previously unknown biosynthetic pathway involving a novel phosphatidylcholine:diacylglycerol cholinephosphotransferase (PDCT) that regulates phosphatidylcholine biosynthesis in developing oil seed plants. Specific aspects relate to inventive PDCT polypeptides including, for example, variants, deletions, muteins, fusion proteins, and orthologs thereof (collectively PDCT proteins), to nucleic acids encoding same, to plants comprising such PDCT sequences or proteins or devoid or depleted of such PDCT proteins or sequences, and to methods for generating plants having altered or no PDCT expression and/or activity, including but not limited to methods comprising mutagenesis, recombinant DNA, transgenics, etc.
An oil seed-bearing plant or a part thereof, wherein the plant or part thereof is other than Arabidopsis, comprising a mutation of at least one phosphatidylcholine:diacylglycerol cholinephosphotransferase (PDCT) sequence that modifies the expression or activity thereof in one or more seeds or developing seeds of the plant, wherein the level, amount, or distribution of fatty acid unsaturation in the seed oil is modified relative to the seed oil of plants with normal seed expression of the PDCT, and wherein the fatty acid unsaturation in seed oil is differentially reduced relative to fatty acid unsaturation in one or more membrane lipids.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.