ABSTRACT
The search for new sources of fats and oils is an ongoing process. By far, plant seeds are the most promising sources of oils for nutritional, industrial, and pharmaceutical purposes. The application of an oil for a particular purpose, however, is determined by its fatty acid and triglyceride compositions. No oil from a single source has been found to be suitable for all purposes, because oils from different sources have different fatty acid compositions. It is for this reason that the search for new sources for novel oils is so important. So far, a large number of plants have been analyzed, and some of these have been cultivated as new crops (Hirsinger, 1989). Another approach to develop novel oils is to produce new cultivars from already established oil crops. The development of low-erucic acid cultivars of Brassica is one good example (Downey and Robbelen, 1989). Other novel crops that are + nding greater utilization include hemp (Parker et al., 2003; Illingworth, 2004), crambe (Yaniv et al., 1991), sea buckthorn (Yang and Kallio, 2001), and cuphea ( Isbell and Behle, 2003). In addition to the nutritional, industrial, and pharmaceutical uses of oil, the variation in fatty acid composition in plants has proven to be a useful tool in taxonomic and phylogenetic studies (Vickery, 1971).
