New crop could transform Australian bioeconomy

Australia’s bioeconomy could receive a substantial boost with the development by the CSIRO of a new ‘super’ safflower that produces high amounts of a valuable plant oil used in food and industry.

The new safflower variety produces oil that contains more than 90 per cent oleic acid oil, the highest level of purity of any individual fatty acid available from any current plant oil.

Oleic oil has a number of uses, including in food and industry, and offers the possibility of a renewable and sustainable oil that can serve as a feedstock for many industrial products, thus replacing petroleum-based feedstocks.

The CSIRO Crop Biofactories Initiative, which is a collaboration between the CSIRO and the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC), used gene silencing to boost levels of oleic acid by silencing genes that converted the oleic acid to polyunsaturates.

“We have succeeded in dramatically lowering the polyunsaturates to below three per cent, thereby raising the monounsaturate oleic acid to over 90 per cent purity,” said Dr Allan Green, Deputy Chief of CSIRO Plant Industry.

Dr Jody Higgins, Senior Manager Commercial Grain Technologies at the GRDC, said the development could create a new crop industry in Australia.

Safflower is ideal for Australian biofactories as it is a very hardy and adaptable crop that does well in warm-season conditions and should cope well with the expected stresses of climate change.

“Our market intelligence has shown that global demand for high purity oleic acid oil could require over 100,000 hectares of ‘super-high’ oleic safflower, which is comparable to the size of the cotton industry in Australia,” Dr Higgins said.

“The Crop Biofactories Initiative will engage in further discussions with a number of local and international companies to develop production of this high value safflower crop in Australia,” she said.