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This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT Rapeseed is a member of family Brassicaceae, cultivated as oil crop. Rapeseed oil is being utilized from early civilization, but its popularity being declined from the mid-nineteenth century due to presence of erucic acid (C22:1) and glucosinolates. Thereby, several attempts have been made to develop cultivars free from those toxins. In the past 20 years, breeders got success in developing '00'-quality rapeseed, known as 'Canola'. The target mutagenesis of fae-1 and fae-2 of Brassica napus ensured such success. Thereafter, 'canola' regains its market as a healthy vegetable oil. Moreover, high oleic acid rapeseed lines, with 86% oleic acid, have been developed by using chemical mutagenesis of FAD2 alleles responsible for desaturation of oleic acid (C18:1) to linoleic acid (C18:2). Recently, high erucic acid rapeseed oil regained interest for biodegradable plastic, cosmetic, emollient industries and for biodiesel. Therefore, breeding approaches have been pursued; unfortunately, that were failed to reach erucic acid level beyond 50% in seed-oil. Rapeseed genotypes over-expressed with Ld-LPAAT separately and Ld-LPAAT-FAE chimaric construct together were tried but failed to reach the erucic acid content more than 60%. Thereof, combined effort of conventional breeding and transgenic approaches are brought together to overcome three hypothesized bottlenecks; reviewed in this article, which restricted erucic acid level near to 60%. Finally, rapeseed genotypes with 78% erucic acid were developed successfully. This material is now available in Germany for using in emollient industries and for biodiesel. Therefore, this article is reviewed on the current status and future outlook for modification of fatty acid profiles of rapeseed oil for its end-use as food, industrial feed-stock and biodiesel.

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The human cathelicidin antimicrobial protein hCAP18, which includes the C-terminal peptide LL-37, is a multifunctional protein. As a possible approach to enhancing the resistance to plant disease, a DNA fragment coding for hCAP18/LL-37 was fused at the C-terminal end of the leader sequence of endopolygalacturonase-inhibiting protein under the control of the cauliflower mosaic virus 35S promoter region. The construct was then introduced into Brassica rapa. LL-37 expression was confirmed in transgenic plants by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction and western blot analysis. Transgenic plants exhibited varying levels of resistance to bacterial and fungal pathogens. The average size of disease lesions in the transgenic plants was reduced to less than half of that in wild-type plants. Our results suggest that the antimicrobial LL-37 peptide is involved in wide-spectrum resistance to bacterial and fungal pathogen infection.

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