ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the genetic engineering of the following oil-bearing crops: rapeseed, soybean, cotton, maize, flax, and oil palm. Plant genetic engineering became a reality with the successful insertion of a bacterial gene into tobacco mediated by a soil bacterium, Agrobacterium tumefaciens. Genetic transformation is a process by which foreign DNA is stably and functionally introduced into living cells. Many significant successes have occurred in the genetic engineering of oil-bearing crops. In addition to the early standard antisense downregulation of genes, new techniques such as inverted-repeat gene-silencing are powerful tools for this downregulation. Despite the successes and prospects, genetic engineering still faces two main challenges, that is, technical limitation and commercialization. The transgenic plants and their products would have to be safe environmentally and for consumption. For environmental safety, there is a call for the creation of antibiotic marker-free transgenic crops.
