Montana State camelina research featured by U.S. Department of Energy

BOZEMAN - A large collaborative project exploring a new oilseed crop led by scientists in Montana State University's College of Agriculture was featured last month by the U.S. Department of Energy for its high scientific impact.

The DOE featured work spearheaded by Chaofu Lu in MSU's Department of Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology in its Science Highlights series, which features research the DOE identifies as particularly exciting. The series draws special attention to around 200 projects annually from thousands of research findings generated by laboratories, colleges and universities nationwide. The article featuring the camelina project, published Oct. 17 and titled "Engineered Yellow-Seeded Camelina Packs More Oil," highlights work by scientists at MSU and the DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Lu leads the "Enhancing Camelina Oilseed Production with Minimal Nitrogen Fertilization in Sustainable Cropping Systems" project, known as ECON. With more than 30 scientists on the team, ECON includes faculty and student researchers from MSU's Department of Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology, along with the Central Agricultural Research Center in Moccasin and the Eastern Agricultural Research Center in Sidney. Beyond MSU and BNL, collaborators also represent Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; the University of California, Davis; and Washington State University.

A relative of the canola plant, camelina is intriguing for its potential as a sustainable source of biofuels, according to Lu. Through plant genetics, physiology and exploration of plant-microbe interactions, the research team is exploring variations in the plant's oil production, with the goal of determining how best to maximize oil content.

"Traditional camelina seeds are brown. Using the tools of modern genetics, scientists disrupted genes called TT8 that are responsible for making brown seed color," the article says. "Those genes also play a key role in oil production. The new engineered camelina produces light yellow seeds and accumulates more than 20% more oil than ordinary varieties."

Lu has been leading camelina research at MSU for more than a decade, and the ECON project is supported by a multi-institution DOE grant of $11 million that was awarded in 2020. Early in the project, Lu noted that camelina is particularly promising for northwestern states, such as Montana, bringing them added opportunity to boost rural economies. Thanks in part to his longtime work with camelina, Lu was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science earlier this year. He is the fifth MSU faculty member to receive the honor in the past decade. He credited the diverse expertise across the ECON team for its extraordinary research productivity and progress on understanding camelina.

"These days, any project like this can't be done without collaboration," Lu said. "We've had many people working on this, and we've made so much progress in the last 10 years or so, just working on this plant. I think being in Montana and doing this research has advantages, and we can adapt our research to our environment."

The full series of Science Highlights from the DOE can be found at energy.gov/science/listings/science-highlights.