The enhancement of vegetable oil quality is an exciting and valuable application of biotechnology. We have produced prototype canola lines that have been engineered to accumulate in the seed oil, the omega-3 fatty acid, SDA. Oil from these lines would be suitable for incorporation into a range of foods, and by comparison to conventional canola oil and soybean oil, have significantly higher levels of effective long chain omega-3 fatty acid precursors and an improved omega-3 to omega-6 ratio (Table 1.) Additionally, because SDA is approximately one-third as efficient as EPA, modest intakes of SDA-containing vegetable oil can be expected to provide the health benefits of recommended fish intakes. A wide variety of SDA-enriched foods, if available, could supply a significant portion of the recommended daily intakes of omega-3 fatty acids to large numbers of consumers. In addition, specific populations exist that could realize even greater benefit from the availability of SDA-enriched foods. These include vegetarians and vegans, whose omega-3 status may border on biochemical deficiency (19) and pregnant women who are faced with contradictory recommendations that include increasing omega-3 intake and decreasing intake of several species of fatty fish including shark, swordfish and king mackerel because of elevated levels of methyl mercury (20).
A large nutritional gap exists between recommended and actual daily intakes of omega-3 fatty acids (2) and it is widely accepted within the scientific and nutritional communities that this contributes to a variety of health consequences. If current advice to increase omega-3 intakes is heeded, demand for omega-3 fatty acids will increase as will the need for alternative sources to fish and fish oil. Biotechnology may provide a truly unique solution to the supply of dietary omega-3 fats by simultaneously solving the existing intrinsic problems of availability and sustainability, as well as that of bioactivity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author thanks Debbie Knutzon for the development of the SDA canola lines described in this paper and the Calgene transformation, greenhouse and analytical staff for the excellent work that enabled this project. The author thanks Toni Voelker and Michael James for reviewing this manuscript.
FOOTNOTES
1 Presented at the Experimental Biology Meeting, April 11–15 2003, San Diego, CA. The symposium was sponsored by The American Society for Nutritional Sciences and supported in part by an educational grant from Nestlé and a USDA-NRI conference grant. The proceedings are published as a supplement to The Journal of Nutrition. This supplement is the responsibility of the guest editors to whom the Editor of The Journal of Nutrition has delegated supervision of both technical conformity to the published regulations of The Journal of Nutrition and general oversight of the scientific merit of each article. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and are not attributable to the sponsors or the publisher, editor or editorial board of The Journal of Nutrition. Guest Editors for the symposium publication are Naima Moustaid-Moussa and Jay Whelan, Department of Nutrition, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN.
3 Abbreviations used: ALA, 
-linolenic acid; CVD, cardiovascular disease; DHA, docosahexaenoic acid; EPA, eicosapentaenoic acid; GLA, 
-linolenic acid; LA, linoleic acid; OA, oleic acid; SDA, stearidonic acid; SFA, saturated fatty acids.
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