COPLBI-1881; NO. OF PAGES 9 Please cite this article in press as: Ortiz R, et al.: Oil crops for the future, Curr Opin Plant Biol (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbi.2019.12.003 Oil crops for the future Rodomiro Ortiz 1 , Mulatu Geleta 1 , Cecilia Gustafsson 1 , Ida Lager 1 , Per Hofvander 1 , Christer Lo ¨ fstedt 2 , Edgar B Cahoon 3 , Elena Minina 4 , Peter Bozhkov 4 and Sten Stymne 1 Agriculture faces enormous challenges including the need to substantially increase productivity, reduce environmental footprint, and deliver renewable alternatives that are being addressed by developing new oil crops for the future. The efforts include domestication of Lepidium spp. using genomics-aided breeding as a cold hardy perennial high-yielding oil crop that provides substantial environmental benefits, expands the geography for oil crops, and improves farmers’ economy. In addition, genetic engineering in Crambe abyssinica may lead to a dedicated industrial oil crop to replace fossil oil. Redirection of photosynthates from starch to oil in plant tubers and cereal endosperm also provides a path for enhancing oil production to meet the growing demands for food, fuel, and biomaterials. Insect pheromone components are produced in seed oil plants in a cost-effective and environmentally friendly pest management replacing synthetically produced pheromones. Autophagy is explored for increasing crop fitness and oil accumulation using genetic engineering in Arabidopsis. Addresses 1 Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Department of Plant Breeding, Alnarp, Sweden 2 Lund University (LU), Lund, Sweden 3 University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, USA 4 Department of Molecular Sciences, Uppsala BioCenter, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Linnean Center for Plant Biology, Uppsala, Sweden Corresponding author: Ortiz, Rodomiro (rodomiro.ortiz@slu.se) Current Opinion in Plant Biology 2019, XX:xx–yy This review comes from a themed issue on AGRI Edited by David Edwards https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbi.2019.12.003 1369-5266/ã 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction The World faces enormous challenges such as increasing productivity while lowering environmental footprints, coping with climate change, and providing renewable alternatives to fossil oil. The potential for plant oils to replace fossil oil is immense due to similarities in chemi- cal structures. Nevertheless, there should be an economic advantage to use plant oil instead of fossil oil and suffi- cient quantity available to realize their full potential. Plant materials optimized in their molecular structures may replace the fossil material in the product and save energy plus processing costs. Crossbreeding facilitated by genomics and genetic engineering may lead to new oil crops that may replace fossil oils in a changing world. This article shows how modern breeding methods (including latest molecular tools) and directed basic research may enhance the production of plant oils, lower production costs and environmental footprints, and opti- mize the oil quality for various non-food uses. Previous research in the area has led to the development of many new oil qualities [1]. Examples of genetic engineered oil crops with altered oil quality that have very recently been deregulated for commercial production are the super high oleic acid safflower [2  ] and rape seed with ‘fish’ fatty acids (very long-chain omega-3 fatty acids) [3  ]. The safflower oil could be used for many industrial applica- tions due its extreme oxidation stability and unprece- dented high oleic acid content and the rape seed oil to replace fish oil in feed for farmed fishes. Our review highlights our efforts to domesticate the wild plant Lepidium spp. as a cold hardy, perennial high-yielding oil crop and develop added-value oils in Crambe spp. — a dedicated industrial oil crop, to replace fossil oil in the chemical industry. We also describe how photosynthates can be re-directed from starch to oil in tubers and endo- sperm — thus providing methods to increase plant oil production. We further describe metabolic engineering efforts that enable production of insect pheromone pre- cursors in seed oil to replace today’s synthetic production of pheromones forecast-effective and environmentally friendly pest management. Moreover, we provide insights on the function of autophagy in crop fitness and oil accumulation. Domestication and breeding of Lepidium as perennial oil crop Many agricultural production systems involve annual crop sowing and tilling, and are energy inefficient and allow pollution of the aquatic environment due to nutrient Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect www.sciencedirect.com Current Opinion in Plant Biology 2019, 13:1–9