1 3 Plant Growth Regul DOI 10.1007/s10725-016-0236-1 ORIGINAL PAPER Genetic engineering approaches to enhance oil content in oilseed crops Siddanna Savadi 1  · Nemappa Lambani 2  · Prem Lal Kashyap 1  · Deepak Singh Bisht 2   Received: 23 July 2016 / Accepted: 16 November 2016 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016 Introduction Oilseed crops play an important role in the agricultural economy, next only to food grains in terms of area and pro- duction. Globally, the demand for vegetable oils is increas- ing due to the increasing per capita consumption of oil in our diets and its use as biofuels (Samarth and Mahanwar 2015). By 2050, the global demand for vegetable oils is expected to be more than twice the current production. Vegetable oils form an essential part of the human diet, as they provide good source of energy, and a variety of Fatty acids (FAs) needed for good health as well as helping in the assimilation of fat soluble vitamins (e.g. A, D, E, and K) into the body (DeLuca 2012). Oils are also used in indus- tries as raw material for synthesis of various products such as soaps, cosmetics, polymers and pharmaceuticals (Elahi et al. 2016a). Apart from direct consumption and indus- trial applications, they are also gaining importance as a replacement for fossil fuels for meeting the energy needs (Issariyakul and Dalai 2014). Therefore, there is a need to enhance oil yields to meet the growing demands. Increasing the oil content in oilseed crops is one option for enhancing oil yield without increasing the area (~201.8 mha, OECD/ FAO 2015) under oilseed crops and to save the inputs used to raise the extra crop required to meet the future global oil shortage. Yield improvement in oilseeds can be addressed by increasing the quantity of oil per seed, by increasing the size of the seed, or by increasing the number of seeds per plant. Each of the steps from photosynthesis, metabolite partitioning to inal conversion and deposition of difer- ent storage products in storage organs determines yield (Camp 2005; Bhat 2010). Accordingly, increasing source strength, sink strength and assimilate partitioning in favour of storage lipids is critical to achieving higher oil yields. Abstract Oilseed crops play an important role in the agricultural economy. Apart from being an integral com- ponent of human diet and industrial applications, they are also gaining importance as replacement to fossil fuels for meeting the energy needs. The last two decades have been marked by several important events in genetic engineering and identiication of gene targets for enhancing seed oil content in oilseed crops, and will aid the successful devel- opment of new generation high yielding oil crops. Specii- cally, genetic engineering has shown real breakthrough in enhancing oil content in oilseed rape, camelina, soybean and maize. Moreover, ongoing research eforts to decipher the possibilities of genetic modiications of key regulators of oil accumulation along with physiological and biochemi- cal studies to understand lipid biosynthesis will set a plat- form to produce transgenic oilseed crops with enhanced oil content. In this review, we briely describe diferent genetic engineering approaches explored by diferent researchers for enhancing oil content. Further, we discuss a few prom- ising and potential approaches and challenges for engineer- ing oil content in oilseed crops. Keywords Oil content · Oilseed · Pathway · Transgenics · TAG Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10725-016-0236-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Siddanna Savadi siddannasavadi@gmail.com 1 ICAR-Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research (IIWBR), Regional Station, Shimla 1710 002, India 2 ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi 110 012, India