As you may know, cultivation of transgenic plants is prohibited in some countries. In other hand, the major plants in brassicaceae family have erucic acid in their seed oil. Then how we can produce a brassicaceae plant with 00 or 000 erucic acid without genetic engineering technology?
Canola (the erucic acid - free rapeseed) is cultivated in over the world. Are this plans NON_GM? If yes, hoe they have been produced?
You said "cultivation of transgenic plants is prohibited". This is only true in some area or some countries. There are many transgenic crops are cultivated around the world, such as transgenic cotton, transgenic soy bean, transgenic corns....in the US, majority of soybean products can be produced from GM plants.
Except using GM method, you can also use old fashion way to produce erucic acid-free plants, such as using mutagenesis....
From the info I obtained, it showed that the low erucic-acid canola was bred--using conventional breeding to breed out the erucic acid (see below links). The breeding program might have begun before the presence of GM technology.
- Canola may refer to an edible and industrial oil (also known as canola oil) produced from the seed of any of several cultivars of rapeseed bred to be low in erucic acid from the Brassicaceae family of plants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canola)
- Canola seeds are derived from rapeseeds, but were especially cross-bred to eliminate many undesirable components of rapeseed, such as glucosinolates, which give rapeseeds a bitter flavor, and erucic acids. (http://livewell.jillianmichaels.com/canola-oil-compared-olive-oil-5365.html)
By the way, from this web link (http://livewell.jillianmichaels.com/canola-oil-compared-olive-oil-5365.html), it indicates "Canola oil must meet specific regulations regarding erucic acid a glucosinolate content, with no more than 2 percent erucic acid and 30 micromoles per gram of glucosinolates." So, I guess today's canola oil probably is not erucic acid zero, but only low in amount. But, as Rahul Kumar has mentioned, with known biosynthesis pathway, and genes controlling this pathway, one can use CRISPR to knock out these genes and get erucis acid-free (zero) plants.
Canola oil available in market is mostly likely GM, introduced by Canadian company originally.
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