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Exploring the Role of Biochemistry to Enhance Oil Biosynthesis in Crop Leaves

Guest Editors:

Antonios Chrysargyris: Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus
Mansour Ghorbanpour: Arak University, Iran
Matteo Caser: University of Turin, Italy

Submission Status: Open   |   Submission Deadline: 31 May 2024 


Chemical and Biological Technologies in Agriculture is calling for submissions to our Collection on "Exploring the Role of Biochemistry to Enhance Oil Biosynthesis in Crop Leaves".

Plants produce oils from their flowers, seeds, barks, roots, leaves, and fruits. There are many different plant-based oils, from olive oil to canola oil and essential oils with different characteristics. Oils of plant origin are generally used for both chemical and healthcare-related industries. Due to high nutritional/industrial values there is a growing demand from a wide variety of applications for plant-derived oils. The produced oils vary in yield, content, constituents, biological activities, and applications. These oils are complex chemical mixtures, rich in fatty acids, microelements, vitamins, and other active compounds, that are responsible for their unique properties. Together with the development of agriculture, biotechnology and processing technology more plant species and plant parts have been used, not only for the production of edible oils, but they are now increasingly being used in industrial applications such as paints/surface coatings, lubricants, soaps, biofuels, etc. 

Cultivation practices/management and appropriate mineral fertilization as well as post-harvest processing are the starting point to increase both biosynthesis and quality of the final oil obtained. The biochemical pathways and the various metabolic processes where key steps and enzymes are involved in oil biosynthesis may vary and be species specific. This research topic aims to gather current and state of the art research and review articles that focus on the significant advancements in understanding the biochemistry of plant lipid metabolism and the biochemical pathways involved in oil biosynthesis, under the scope of producing plant-derived oils as a novel sustainable source of energy-dense oil for food, feed, biomaterials, and biofuels markets.

This Collection supports and amplifies research related to to SDG2: Zero Hunger.

Image Credit: cjaka / Getty Images / iStock

Meet the Guest Editors

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Antonios Chrysargyris: Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus

Dr. Antonios Chrysargyris (biologist) is a researcher at the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT), at the Department of Agricultural Sciences, Biotechnology and Food Sciences (Hydro-Aromatic Plants Group). His main research is focused on medicinal/aromatic plants cultivation, mineral needs, nutritional value, and the biological activities of plant extracts and essential oils. He also works in postharvest level, evaluating innovative, ecofriendly preservation, and sanitizing means as essential oils and plant extracts, with applications on fruits, vegetables and aromatic plants. He works mostly with hydroponic/soilless cultivation of plants, application of biotic/abiotic stress, evaluating new organic and inorganic materials as growing media, and their effects on the produced plants. He has worked as a researcher in a series of National and European funded projects, published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals, 4 chapters in peer reviewed books and participated with more than 80 presentations in National and International conferences (>2000 citations, H index 25). He serves as a reviewer in more than 30 scientific journals, and as Associate, Review or Quest Editor in high quality peer reviewed scientific journals. Lately he is listed in the ranking list among the Top 2% of researchers in the world for the year 2021 (Agronomy and Agriculture, Plant Biology and Botany), as published by the Stanford University.

Mansour Ghorbanpour: Arak University, Iran

Prof. Dr. Mansour Ghorbanpour is a faculty member at the Department of Medicinal Plants, and the Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at Arak University (Arak, Iran).
Dr. Ghorbanpour obtained his MSc. and Ph.D degrees in Crop Ecology from Tehran university (Karaj, Iran), and has been a visiting scholar in the Nutrient Uptake and Toxicity Stress (NUTS) group at the University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. He specializes in medicinal and aromatic plant production and domestication. The research interests of Dr. Ghorbanpour include medicinal plants and their bioactive ingredients biosynthesis, environmental stressors and elicitors, discovery, or development of new therapeutic plants/and products, phytonanotechnology, bioavailability of emerging contaminants in plant-soil systems, agricultural practices/techniques for increasing plant primary and secondary metabolites, Diversity of natural products and bioactive compounds of aromatic medicinal plants, etc. Up to now, Dr. Ghorbanpour has published over 160 journal articles, 55 book chapters and 12 book volumes. The name of Dr. Ghorbanpour listed as “Top 2% scientists of the world” in last 3 consecutive years (2019-2021) by Stanford University, USA: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/listed-stanford-university-worlds-top-2-scientists-shady-attia. He also maintains a worldwide network and is a reviewer and editorial board membership of many international scientific peer-reviewed journals. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Jx9-0mwAAAAJ&hl=en

Matteo Caser: University of Turin, Italy

Dr. Caser is a Full-time fixed-term researcher at University of Turin, Italy. His research activity is carried out in the field of Horticultural Cultivation Systems, of which the agronomic, physiological and biochemical aspects are investigated in particular, with the aim of studying the factors that control the plant-environment system. The ultimate goal is to promote total quality, understood as the integration of production aspects and transformations with particular attention to environmental sustainability, both in the open field and in protected and soilless crops.

  1. Thymus persicus is a valuable natural source of anticancer triterpenic acids (TAs) such as betulinic acid (BA), oleanolic acid (OA), and ursolic acid (UA), which is growing wild in the northwest of Iran. In the p...

    Authors: Ziba Bakhtiar, Mohammad Hossein Mirjalili, Mohammad Selseleh, Alireza Yavari and Mansour Ghorbanpour
    Citation: Chemical and Biological Technologies in Agriculture 2023 10:147
    Content type: Research Published on:

  2. Gray mold, attributed to Botrytis cinerea, poses a substantial threat to food security in fruit-growing regions impacted by global climate change. Addressing this disease requires the utilization of either resili...

    Authors: Sinem Karakus, Okkes Atıcı, Metin Turan, Sahar Azizi, Hanifeh Seyed Hajizadeh and Ozkan Kaya
    Citation: Chemical and Biological Technologies in Agriculture 2023 10:136
    Content type: Research Published on:

Submission Guidelines

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This Collection welcomes submission of Research Articles. 

Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have read our submission guidelines. Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system. During the submission process, under the section additional information, you will be asked whether you are submitting to a Collection, please select "Exploring the Role of Biochemistry to Enhance Oil Biosynthesis in Crop Leaves" from the dropdown menu.

Articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process and are subject to all of the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.