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 Approximately 70% of vegetable oil products, such as salad oil and margarine, sold in Canada are derived from canola. Canola products export has increased significantly in the last 20 years. Canola is now a major crop in Canada with a five year average of 11 millions acres harvested each year. Canola is ranked third after wheat and barely in terms of acres seeded. In addition, canola is one of the few oil crops adapted to the cold climate of the Canadian prairies. Canola has an economic impact of $2.5 billion in Canada per year. This impact consists of a farm gate value of $1 billion, with value-added activities, such as processing, accounting for the rest.
Canola has very low level of saturated fats compared to other vegetable oils. It is desirable to reduce the saturates even lower from 7% currently, ideally to 3%, and raise mono-unsaturates to levels found in olive oil and slightly reduce the poly-unsaturates, bringing them from 8% to approximately 4%. This change would increase shelf life of the oil.
It is also desirable to produce more oil per unit of land. This would open up new markets. Canola meal is not currently as digestible as soybean meal. Canola protein could be improved through the application of genomic technologies and could eventually enter into the human food market.
Given the nutritional and economic importance of canola, as well as changes in the world market for vegetable oils, canola is an important target for genomic research. Genomics is revolutionising the speed with which biological information can be accumulated because of the use of the large scale application of semi-automated molecular and informatics technologies.
In addition to the "Enhancing Canola Through Genomics"
project, the "Functional
Genomics of Abiotic Stress" project is also using genomics
tools to study the way canola tolerates cold, salinity and other
nonbiological stresses.
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