From meeting the essential needs to being well-off, Chinese people have changed their consumption habit greatly. They demand safer, greener, healthier and more versatile products, which should be the important targets for more creative sciences and technology in agriculture. To meet the new demands, oilseed rape research and development are strongly needed in two strategies, whcih are “whole-value-and-whole-industry” strategy (double-whole strategy) and differential exploitation strategy. In the strategies, exploiting the whole production chain should be considered with functional oil, vegetable, honey, fodder, fertilizer and landscape of oilseed rape. And each commercial product would be focused in a whole-chain developing view. The research and development should be focused on functional rapeseed oil, functional vegetables and tourism attraction of the flowering field, with the aim to improve global economic competitiveness of the crop. This paper strengthened the coordination of rapeseed functional, efficiency and their integration in China.
Except for oil , rapeseed also has many other functions, such as vegetable, flower, honey, forage and fertilizer. From the single usage, rapeseed economic benefits are not high, but according to growth process for comprehensive development and utilization , can realize "one vegetable multipurpose", greatly improve the planting efficiency, promote the Integration of planting and breeding, integration of using and breeding , and the deeply integrated development of the primary, secondary, and tertiary industries. This paper summarized the present situation of Chinese rapeseed multifunction development and utilization , analyzed the successful cases of the comprehensive development and utilization, and put forward the countermeasures and suggestions for development and utilization, in order to provide reference to further research and development of the multifunctional development and utilization, and to promote the development of rapeseed industry effectively.
To provide important information for improving fatty acid in oilseeds, fatty acid elongase FAE1 and its substrate specificity were studied using transginc Camelina sativa and Arabidopsis mutants. Two Brassica napus FAE1 genes (BnaA.FAE1 from A genome and BnaC.FAE1 from C genome) were separately cloned from A and C subgenomes of B. napus. Then they were transformed and heterozygously expressed in C. sativa seeds. Results showed that C22:0/C22:1 was 0.18 in BnaA.FAE1-transgenic seeds, and 0.88 in BnaC.FAE1-transgenic seeds. It suggested that BnaA.FAE1 exhibited higher preference to mono-unsaturated fatty acid, while BnaC.FAE1 inclined to use saturated fatty acid as substrate. Acyl-CoAs analysis of T3 seeds also supported this conclusion. BnaA.FAE1 and BnaC.FAE1 were also expressed in seeds of Arabidopsis thaliana fad2/fae1 double mutant. Contents of C22:0 and C22:1 were increased, but the ratio of C22:0/C22:1 was not significantly different. The fatty acid composition was analyzed in seeds of Brassica rapa and Brassica oleracea, which were ancestors of B. napus. However, the difference of C22:0/C22:1 ratios in these two species were not significant either. This study discovered substrate specificity difference between BnaA.FAE1 and BnaC.FAE1 in transgenic camelina seeds, and provided important information for improving fatty acid in oilseeds.
Spring rapeseed mainly distributes in the western high-altitude region and the northern high-latitude region in China, the yield per unit area and oil content are higher than the national average, accounting for about 1/10 of the total area of rapeseed in China. This article mainly summarized the germplasm resources innovation, important agronomic traits related gene (QTL) mapping, the new varieties breeding and application of spring rapeseed of China in recent years, and pointed out the main problems and prospects for the study of the spring rapeseed production, which provided references for the genetic breeding of spring rapeseed in future.
Harvest index (HI) of Brassia napus L. is relatively low compared to other crops, but significant differences were shown among different varieties. Based on the previous studies, the HI of B. napus L. was restricted by ?flow? rather than ?source? and ?sink?. Clarification of the genetic mechanism of high HI in rapeseed provided theories and approaches for high-yield rapeseed breeding. In this paper, we briefly summarized the researches on crop HI around the world, and introduced the progress on rapeseed HI under different environments by the Southwest University. The later included genetic relationship of HI-related traits, plant type, physiological and biochemical characteristics and transcriptome analyses on high HI materials in different environments, mapping and screening of candidate genes, functional analyses on sucrose transporter genes SUC and SWEET, and on sucrose phosphate synthase genes SPS in rapeseed. which were important references for other researches on HI studies of B. napus.
The functional genomics of rapeseed represents the foundation of the strategy transition from traditional rapeseed breeding to modern scientific breeding. Gratifying achievement of allotetraploid rapeseed functional genomic research has been made in recent years. This paper reviewed the research advance on functional genomics in rapeseed, and summarized function and molecular mechanism of rapeseed genes for important agronomic traits, including male sterility system, yield, quality and nutrient metabolism etc. According to current situation of breeding production and functional genomics research, suggestions were made to promote the application of functional genomics research achievement to the breeding system, cultivating sovereign and efficient rapeseed varieties, for enhancing the international competitiveness of agricultural biotechnology breeding.
MicroRNA (miRNAs) is a class of endogenous non-coding small RNAs (sRNAs) of 21?24 nt in length which is widespread in eukaryptes. They play crucial regulatory roles in various developmental processes by cleavage target or translation repression at posttranscriptional level. With the improvement of high-throughput sequencing technology and experimental techniques, great progress has been made in studying miRNA in plants. The research of miRNA has become popular. As an important oil crop, a large number of miRNAs and their targets have been discovered in rapeseed, which can participate in heterosis, seed development, polyploidy and stress response. In this paper, studies on miRNA involved in the regulation of rapeseed development in recent years were reviewed, and the study of miRNA in rapeseed was prospected, providing references for further studies on functionality of miRNA in the future.
Chinese woad (Isatis indigotica Fort., 2n = 14, II), which belongs to the Isatideae tribe of Brassicaceae family has been widely cultivated as a medicinal and dye plant from ancient times, and its root (Radix Isatidis) is common medicine for the indications of eruptive epidemic diseases caused by bacteria and viruses, but its genetics and genome structure are not well studied. For more than 10 years the intertribal somatic hybrid (2n = 52, AACCII) between rapeseed (Brassica napus L., 2n = 38, AACC) and Chinese woad have been produced and backcrossed recurrently to parental rapeseed, leading to the establishment of a complete set of alien additional lines with each woad chromosome in the rapeseed background for the dissection of woad genome. Specifically, three additions with larger biomass than woad showed strong activity against influenza viruses, which provided novel vegetable for human and fodder or feed additives for livestock. Additionally, one new cytoplasmic male sterile line（inap CMS）was produced, and showed carpelloid stamens but contained recombinant mitochondrial DNA. Fertility restoration line for inap CMS was produced by the introgression of the chromosomal segment carrying the anther development related gene(s) from one particular woad chromosome.
In this paper, rapeseed researchers in Henan Province analyzed the heterosis of seed yield, yield-related, stress resistance and quality related traits, and genetic and physiological and biochemical basis of CMS in Brassica napus L. A number of strong heterosis rapeseed hybrids have been bred by adopting cytoplasmic male sterile systems. The yield, quality and stress-resistance of the hybrids have been improved remarkably, and have been widely cultivated. The average yield in Henan Province was 2 288.6 kg/hm2 in 2003-2016, was 50% higher than the period of 1978-2000, and was 23.58% higher than in the corresponding period of China. In the future, the heterosis utilization of cytoplasmic male sterility in Brassica napus L. in Henan Province will be focus on breeding strong heterosis rapeseed hybrids varieties with high oil content, lodging-resistant, pod-shattering resistance and adaptive mechanization.It is urgent to strengthen prevention and control clubroot diseases and breed clubroot diseases resistant varieties. In addition, the potential of rapeseed multifunctional utilization must be fully explored in vegetable, fertilizer, fodder, producing honey, landscape and so on.
As the food reform policy progressed gradually for three years in China, the planting area of fodder-rapeseed in North-west, North-east and Yangtze River valley increased, more and more people accepted rapeseed as fodder plant. In this paper, we reviewed the development history and described the characteristics of fodder-rapeseed. And we also summarized the progress in fodder-rapeseed breeding, cultivation technology, farming system and feeding technology. The problems in fodder-rapeseed production and research were discussed and the research subjects were proposed.
Rapeseed is one of the important oil crops and tillage is the basic process for agricultural production. This paper reviewed the general situation of rapeseed planting, including the main rapeseed planting area in the world and the Winter and Spring rapeseed planting area in China. The area and production in Winter rapeseed planting area were both above 90% for rapeseed planting in China. The tillage systems for rapeseed planting all over the world were analysed. The main tillage technology and equipment for rapeseed planting were summarised, including seedbed managing, deep fertilizing, straw application, resistance and adhesion reducing and intelligent tillage. In this review, we also pointed out the problems and development tendency for rapeseed tillage.
Sclerotinia stem rot (SSR) caused by pathogenic fungus Sclerotinia sclerotiorum (Lib.) de Bary is a major disease of rapeseed (Brassica napus L.) in China, causing 10%—20% of yield losses every year. Breeding and cultivation of resistant varieties are the most efficient and economic approaches in control of SSR in rapeseed. Here, we review the main advances in molecular mechanism of B. napus?S. sclerotiorum interaction in the past five years. These studies showed that (1) S. sclerotiorum persist a biotrophic lifestyle during the early stages of infection; (2) Acidic pH, not oxalic acid per se, is the necessary condition for disease development; (3) S. sclerotiorum effectively utilizes effectors to facilitate infection by suppressing plant basal defense responses or modulating host cell death; (4) The heritability of SSR resistance in B. napus is moderate, and is quantitative resistance; (5) Pathogen-associated molecular pattern triggered immunity (PTI) is the main source of the quantitative resistance to SSR; (6) Functional genomics studies showed that the resistance/tolerant B. napus lines could activate stronger defense responses, effectively regulate the redox equilibrium stat, eliminate the accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), and impair cell death. These results provide insights into the complex molecular mechanisms of B. napus - S. sclerotiorum interaction, which will be helpful in developinn effective strategies in Sclerotinia-resistance breeding.
