Variety of Plant Oils: Species-Specific Lipid Biosynthesis.

The article focuses on recent advances in understanding plant oil biosynthesis, emphasizing species-specific pathways, gene co-expression networks, and structurally divergent enzymes involved in triacylglycerol (TAG) accumulation. It compares lipid metabolism gene expression across representative plants such as Arabidopsis thaliana, Ricinus communis (castor bean), Linum usitatissimum L. (flax), and Elaeis guineensis (oil palm), highlighting how unique fatty acid profiles arise from specialized enzymes like fatty acid desaturases (FAD2 and its divergent forms), diacylglycerol acyltransferases (DGATs), phospholipid:diacylglycerol acyltransferases (PDATs), and oleosins (OLEs). The review also discusses the formation of protein complexes (metabolons) that facilitate substrate channeling and the complex regulation of lipid biosynthesis, including transcriptional, translational, and post-translational mechanisms. These insights have implications for metabolic engineering aimed at producing valuable and unusual fatty acids in plants.