Diego Villanueva-Mejía

By Diego Villanueva-Mejia and Javier Correa Alvarez

In 2009, big challenges facing the agricultural sector in the twenty-first century were presented to the world. Human population growth, increased life expectancy, loss of biodiversity, climate change and accelerated land degradation are the main factors contributing to rethink agriculture system production. In that scenery, modern biotechnology has set a stage for the advancement of agricultural practices and it is clearly an important ally to apply a broad array of technologies and innovative systems where they are most needed, such as enhancing crop productivity, increasing yields, and ultimately ensuring food security. One of the biggest challenges is related to technify production systems, but with no doubt, developing genetic improvement toward getting an efficient and sustainable agriculture, generating new seed qualities (new traits), such as, among others, to upset fatty acids content in oilseed crops have been growing up significantly due to industry interest. In this study, a review about the main advances in genetic improvement of some oilseed crops, starting with omics to understand metabolic routes and to find out key genes in seed oil production, and also, getting in use of modern biotechnology to alter the production of fatty acids, and to face biotic challenges in oilseed crops is presented.

Part of the book: Seed Biology

By Viviana Ramírez-Ríos, Javier Correa Alvarez and Diego Villanueva- Mejia

In this chapter, the complete mitochondrial genome of Guatemalan potato moth, Tecia solanivora (Povolny, 1973) (Lepidoptera: Gelechiidae) is presented as a model to understand how to characterize and study a mitogenome in insects. It was sequenced, analyzed, and compared with other lepidopteran insects. T. solanivora mitogenome is a circular double-stranded molecule, typically found in insects and containing 37 genes, all them well described over the other lepidopteran mitogenomes sequenced. Interestingly, in this mitogenome was found a gene arrangement in the tRNA-Met gene different from the ancestral arrangement, but commonly present in insect mitogenomes. Other important characteristics are the high A + T-biased and negative AT- and GC-skews contents, but also unusual canonical start codons in 12 protein-coding genes and an incomplete stop codon in the cytochrome oxidase subunit II gene consisting of just a Thymine. Another common feature shared with lepidopteran mitogenomes is the A + T-rich region. It is characterized by having 325 bb, the ‘ATAGA’ motif, a 17 bp poly (T) stretch and a (AT)8 element preceded by the ‘ATTTA’ motif. Likewise, this mitogenome has 21 intergenic spacer regions. In addition, an update about other recent mitogenomes research done mainly over lepidopteran insects considered crop pests is presented. On the other hand, a novel development based on induced mutations by CRISPR-Cas9 in the mitogenomes seeking applicable capability for pest control is shown. The utility of this study is to improve scientific databases and support future studies of population genetic in lepidopteran.

Part of the book: Lepidoptera