Advances in tailoring camelina and pennycress oilseeds for specialty metabolites

Abstract

Oilseeds provide a renewable platform to produce lipids and other valuable biomolecules. While conventional crops accumulate a limited set of fatty acids, advances in synthetic biology now enable exogenous pathways to expand oil diversity. The oilseeds camelina (Camelina sativa) and pennycress (Thlaspi arvense) have emerged as powerful platforms for this work due to their efficient transformation methods. Recent breakthroughs have come from genome-editing rewiring of endogenous lipid metabolism to remove competing pathways, which, when combined with bioprospecting to identify more efficient enzymes, delivers the greatest gains in product yield. Overcoming challenges such as achieving cell-type–specific expression and developing scalable strategies for pathway gene expression control will ensure these crops realize their potential as versatile platforms for next-generation bioproducts.