The Philippines is developing a genetically modified (GM) coconut with increased lauric acid to equal at least canola’s 60 percent content to enable it to keep a leadership in the world’s vegetable oil export market.

Coconut oil is Philippines’ single biggest farm export with foreign exchange earnings of some $500 million yearly which it aims to sustain on the long term.

Known to have the traditionally-bred vegetable with the highest lauric acid oil content, coconut just has 47 to 48 percent lauric acid content compared to the GM canola’s 60 percent even if the US’s normal canola only has 52 percent.

“The Philippines is meeting 65 percent of the world’s need for vegetable oil. (But) the development of canola with 60 percent lauric acid content makes it difficult for us to compete in the market, unless we’re able to modify it through genetic engineering,” Dr. Rita P. Laude, gene discovery project leader, University of the Philippines-Los Baños, said in an interview.

Financed by the Philippine Council for Agriculture Natural Resources Forestry Research and Development (PCARRD), the research evokes scientists’ renewed optimism in discovering a gene, having successfully cloned three genes or DNAs from coconut.

The three cloned genes significant in fatty acid synthesis – acetyl CoAcarboxylase, acyl-ACP thioesterase, phosphatidic acid phosphatase – will soon be proved for their ability to produce the enzymes that will “overexpress” or multiply the gene characterizing coconut’s lauric acid content.

“The genes that we found have the highly-conserved amino acid region specific to produce that enzyme. We’re quite sure it’s the gene of interest for coconut,” Asst. Prof. Marni E. Cueno, who works on the gene discovery with Laude.

Cueno said the Institute of Biological Sciences has to clone three more genes – beta ketoacyl ACP synthase3, acyl carrier protein, and lysophosphatidic acid acyltransferase in order to maximize increase in potential GM lauric acid content.

“All of these enzymes are important to the fatty acid synthesis so that we can hit the targeted increase in lauric acid content,” he said.

Once all the genes are cloned and are overexpressed, they will be inserted in coconut and regenerated to grow coconut plants that will produce the desired fruits.

Despite some success in gene discovery, the country’s development of GM coconut is slowed by the limited success in the regeneration of plants with the transformed gene which also involves the biotechnology technique tissue culture.

Early tests conducted by the Philippine Coconut Authority showed a 20 percent success in the transformation event or the transfer of the overexpressed genes (with higher lauric acid content) into the coconut.

Moreover, regeneration or growth of the plant with the transformed gene was very low at two out of 70,000 trials.

The Institute of Plant Breeding may need to use another somatic cell (cells that reproduce) to carry the transformed gene since it has found low level of regeneration in the use of three somatic cells that come from coconut’s mature embryo coconut’s immature embryo, and coconut’s plumule (coconut fruit growth).

While the US started researching on GM canola in 1992, the Philippines has lagged far behind as it just started researching on GM coconut in 1999.

And when the US started, it already had many tissue culture studies for the regeneration of the GM canola plant, unlike the Philippines’ fairly unsuccessful tissue culture for the GM coconut’s regeneration. The US commercially launched its GM canola in 19991.