Identification and stacking of crucial traits required for the domestication of pennycress

Abstract

The oilseed species Thlaspi arvense (pennycress)-a weed that was only recently removed from the wild-has the potential to provide new sources of food and bioproducts when grown as a winter cover crop. Domestication of wild species has historically taken hundreds to thousands of years, but by making use of large-scale high-throughput comparative gene and phenotype analyses, along with recently developed technological tools, it has been possible to greatly accelerate this process. By taking advantage of extensive gene and phenotype knowledge in the related plant Arabidopsis, mutations for early maturity, reduced pod shatter, reduced seed glucosinolates and improved fatty acid composition were identified. Progress has been made to rapidly stack these traits in order to domesticate the plant, allowing it to fit within current crop cycles and to have improved seed harvestability and nutritional content. Pennycress, domesticated as a winter cover crop, may provide new sources of food, animal feed and bioproducts-and solutions to food security.

CRISPR/Cas9-Induced fad2 and rod1 Mutations Stacked With fae1 Confer High Oleic Acid Seed Oil in Pennycress (Thlaspi arvense L.)

“…Like Arabidopsis, pennycress is well-suited for laboratory studies, growing well side by side with Arabidopsis in growth chambers and greenhouses and being readily genetically transformable using an Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated floral dip method, albeit requiring vacuum application during the floral dip (McGinn et al, 2019). Ease of pennycress mutagenesis using ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) as well as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)/Cas9 gene editing, along with its ease of growth and study in farm field settings, makes pennycress an attractive multifunctional model system for simultaneous basic and applied research (Sedbrook et al, 2014;Chopra et al, 2018Chopra et al, , 2020Sedbrook and Durrett, 2020;Tsogtbaatar et al, 2020).…”

Analyzing Mass Spectrometry Imaging Data of 13C-Labeled Phospholipids in Camelina sativa and Thlaspi arvense (Pennycress) Embryos

“…Embryos of oilseeds direct significant carbon through primary metabolism toward the biosynthesis of storage lipids. Due to the importance of vegetable oils to human nutrition and biotechnological applications, lipid metabolism in oilseeds, including emerging oilseed crops such as Camelina sativa and Thlaspi arvense , have received considerable attention [ 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ]. Lipid metabolites are particularly well suited to ionization and analysis by MALDI-MS.…”

Open-Inquiry vs. Broadly Relevant Short-Term Research Experiences for Non-Biology Majors

“…Students who participated in a broadly relevant research experience worked on a cutting-edge research topic and contributed their findings to a University of Minnesota professor’s ongoing research ( 27 – 30 ). Students were assigned a novel research question, generated original results, and communicated their results outside of the classroom.…”

“…In groups of four, students selected for this desirable phenotype by planting seeds derived from mutagenized plants into trays containing potting mix. Two weeks later, students scanned the trays for mutants with longer hypocotyls ( 27 ). Mutants were found that had a significantly longer hypocotyl length as determined by the students when compared with wild-type pennycress plants.…”