The Path to Economically Viable Foreign Protein Co-Products of Oilseeds

Biotechnology would play a fundamental role in implementing societal objectives, such as supplementing the U.S. and world energy supplies with soybean oil as a primary feedstock for biodiesel fuel. However, engineering soybean to produce more oil might not be sustainable unless value also is added to soybean co-products like soybean meal. A successful strategy for adding more value to soybean meal must consider the impact that more specialized high-value industrial protein products might exert upon critical applications such as commodity scale uses of soybean for feed and food. While the natural intrinsic characteristics of soybean protein already have significant value as a co-product, the strength of those advantages may be amplified through precise changes in the composition of soybean seed protein. This chapter discusses the need to understand the fundamental aspects of soybean molecular biology in efforts to reconstruct the protein composition in soybean seed and to translate this biology into useful tools for genetic engineering of novel beneficial traits in seeds.