Agri News
Karen Binder AgriNews Publications
CARBONDALE, Ill. — Researchers at Southern Illinois University have helped unlock the healthy goodness of olive oil, literally placing its coveted oleic acid available into the agriculture industry’s hands.
Thanks to the gene sequencing skills of Oussama Badad, 29, he’s contributed the map leading to the genetic map coordinates for oleic oil and all of the other nutrient components of olive oil.
“We did genome sequencing of the olive tree, assembled all of the genomes and put all the pieces together — that is, the annotations,” Badad explained. “We also identified which gene is responsible for certain proteins and assembles them all. A story emerges as we assign functions to those proteins and evolve them into pathways. We do pathway analysis.”
Badad is a Fulbright scholar who selected SIU’s College of Agricultural Sciences in fall 2015 to finish his doctorate in Plant DNA Data Analysis.
What that means is the reading data from sequencers that turn into binary files and decoding them into human language, Badad said.
He is advised by David Lightfoot, an SIUC researcher and professor who first completed the soybean genome and has been a familiar researcher among U.S. soybean entities.
Of course, Badad has not completed all of this work on his own. He’s part of a global team known as International Olive Genome Consortium that initially launched the olive tree project in Turkey. Over the years, more than a dozen other scientists in Belgium, Morocco and the United States have contributed to the effort.
Their efforts now stand before the world as a published paper appearing in “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” called “Genome of wild olive and the evolution of oil biosynthesis.”
More Than Healthy
Certainly the science is heady stuff, but its importance is as simple as drizzling olive oil into a salad, Lightfoot said.
“Olive oil is one of the oldest and most important dietary genomes,” he said. “We all love olive oil. It’s one of the most culturally significant crops that you can imagine.”
Olive trees are a millennia-old staple of Mediterranean countries. In fact, in Badad’s home town in Morocco, every family’s pride is rooted in its olive trees on their properties.
With an obvious taste for olive oil, Badad explained that olive oil is on every Moroccan table and used like butter or poured over cheese, in tagine dishes, pizza and beans.
“It’s really important in Africa. The more oil you produce, the more value you have within the community,” Badad said. “Some in the country think it’s divine.”
Helps Soybeans, Too
With this kind of reverence for olive products, the genome’s importance is only a biotechnical first step toward crop improvement. The genetic map will help scientists better understand the olive tree’s productivity rhythms — olive trees tend to have generous yields only every other year
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The next part of the olive tree study will be identifying the biological forces responsible for this phenomenon and exploring ways to adapt them for improved crops, Badad said.
“This also is a problem for apples, peaches and other fruit tress,” Lightfoot added. “If we can study this problem in olive, we can help other species to at least help elucidate the mechanics of how it happens.”
But there’s another benefit of the study, Lightfoot said. Soybeans also contain valuable amounts of oleic oil, which has been a key marketing asset for U.S. soybeans over the years.
“The potential is just huge,” Lightfoot said. “It can help all oilseeds. We now understand why olive oil is olive oil.”
This understanding can next to applied toward improving the quality of the oils, developing disease resistance and finding improvements for its use in cosmetics, medicine binders and dozens of other uses.
The magazine noted that the study shows “the genetic basis responsible for the high concentrations of oleic acid in the fruit of the olive tree, compared to other plant species. The detailed process of identifying these 50,684 genes will allow genetic improvements … for varieties capable of producing more oil in diverse environmental conditions.
“This is really big, mind blowing big,” Lightfoot said.
