How Plants Make Oils: Lessons from Avocado and Opportunities in Moss
Plant Biology Seminar Series

Abstract:
Plants use diverse strategies to channel carbon into energy-dense oils, and understanding these mechanisms offers insight into both plant evolution and new opportunities for sustainable bioproduction. Avocado (Persea americana), with its unusually oil-rich mesocarp, provides a powerful system for uncovering regulators that enable high triacylglycerol (TAG) accumulation in non-seed tissues. My group has identified key avocado transcription factors (PaWRI1 and the lineage-divergent PaWRI2) and acyltransferases (PaDGAT1, PaPDAT1) that cooperate to redirect carbon toward oleic acid–rich oils. When expressed in Nicotiana benthamiana, these regulators dramatically elevate TAG levels and reprogram fatty acid biosynthetic networks. These discoveries illustrate how metabolic innovations have evolved across plant lineages and reveal regulatory nodes that can be leveraged for engineering oil production. Building on this foundation, we are now exploring whether these avocado-derived regulators can be used to reprogram carbon allocation in the moss Physcomitrium patens. As an early-diverging land plant with rapid growth, genetic tractability, and fully contained cultivation, moss provides a promising platform to study lipid regulation from an evolutionary perspective while assessing its potential for translational applications. This complementary system may offer new avenues for producing plant-derived oils and bio-based products relevant to food, health, and the bioeconomy. Together, our work combines comparative biology, metabolic engineering, and emerging model systems to shed light on how plants make oils and how these pathways can be harnessed for future innovations.

About the Speaker:
Dr. Aruna Kilaru is a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences and the Faculty Fellow for Interdisciplinary Innovation in the Biosciences at East Tennessee State University. Her research focuses on plant lipid metabolism, metabolic engineering, and the development of sustainable platforms for producing plant-derived oils and bio-based products. Her group integrates molecular, biochemical, and synthetic biology tools to understand and reprogram lipid pathways across angiosperms and early land plants, with current efforts expanding into moss-based biomanufacturing systems.

Dr. Kilaru earned her master’s degree from MS University, Baroda, and her Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, followed by postdoctoral training at the University of North Texas and Michigan State University. She has served as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the USDA foreign agricultural service and later as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation.

At ETSU, she is leading campus-wide initiatives to establish a Synthetic Biology & Bioengineering Research Center and new academic programs in biological engineering. Her work has been supported by NSF, NIH, USDA, and BioMADE awards aimed at advancing biomanufacturing training and translational moss platforms. Dr. Kilaru is an elected Fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) and serves on the editorial board of Plant Physiology. She is recognized for her contributions to plant lipid biology, synthetic biology education, and interdisciplinary research innovation.

Contact

  Hong Ma
  hxm16@psu.edu