Metabolic engineering of plant biomass production of biofuel

Abstract

Tobacco plants engineered to constitutively overexpress DGAT, a key enzyme in plant lipid biosynthesis, or to inducibly express a transcription factor LEC2 that govern seed maturation, have about two-fold increase in total fatty acid content in their green biomass. The increased fatty acid content was accompanied by changes in their composition that favor development of tobacco as a renewable source of biofuel.