Breeding for specialty oil types in sunflower

Abstract

Oil quality in vegetable oils is a relative concept that depends on the enduse of the oil. Vegetable oils are intended for food applications (salads and cooking oils, margarines, shortenings, etc) and nonfood industrial applications (biodiesel, lubricants, surfactants, etc). Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) oil has been traditionally appreciated in the world oil market. However, new emerging markets are demanding changes in oil quality for both food and nonfood applications. Nutritional and functional properties determining oil quality are primarily determined by the fatty acid composition of oil and the total content and composition of natural antioxidants, especially tocopherols. During the last 30 years these components have been extensively modified in sunflower through conventional selection from naturally occurring variation and trough mutagenesis. As a result, together with the standard sunflower oil whose fatty acid profile is made up of 11% saturated fatty acids, 20% oleic acid, and 69% linoleic acid, there is currently available a vast diversity of other sunflower oil types, for example low saturated (<7%), high palmitic (>25%), high stearic (>25%), high oleic (>85%), high linoleic (>75%) as well as a number of oils with intermediate levels and combinations among them. Similarly, the standard sunflower oil with 95% of the tocopherols in the alpha-tocopherol form has been modified to produce oils with high levels of betatocopherol (>75%), gamma-tocopherol (>95%), and delta-tocopherol (>65%). The novel fatty acid and tocopherol traits are in all cases governed by a reduced number of genes, which facilitates considerably their management in plant breeding programs aimed at developing cultivars with improved oil quality.

Fatty Acid Contents and Stability of Oyster Nut Oil (Telfairia pedata) Compared to Flaxseed and Sunflower Oil

“…Hence, oil sources with low LA contents are more preferred for consumption. This has led the vegetable oil industry to focus breeding efforts towards sunflower varieties with less LA and more oleic acid [ 22 ].…”

The diversity of fatty acid composition in traditional and rare oil crops cultivated in Russia

“…However, the percentage content of the minor acids ranging in the interval of 0.002 %-0.003 % has no effect on the qualitative characteristics of sunflower oil (Demurin et al, 2016). Mutants with a high content of palmitic acid up to 25 % (Perez-Vich, 2002) or with a high content of stearic acid (~25 %) (Fernandez-Martinez et al, 2004, 2007 were created. It was supposed that the high content of palmitic acid in sunflower oil is controlled by several recessive alleles: one in the line 275HP (Ivanov et al, 1988) and three in the line CAS-5 (Perez-Vich et al, 2002).…”

Rapid Authentication of Potato Chip Oil by Vibrational Spectroscopy Combined with Pattern Recognition Analysis

“…Stability of oil is directly related to its degree of unsaturation, and HO sunflower oils, which have over 70% oleic acid, are more stable than their counterparts with higher content of polyunsaturated fatty acids, linoleic and linolenic acids, fulfilling a better performance in the heating tolerance for a longer fry life [41][42][43]. The varieties of HO sunflower (I) oil containing over 80% oleic acid and HO sunflower (II) oil containing from 70% to 80% oleic acid can come from genetic selection, naturally occurring variation and trough mutagenesis [44].…”