From Arabidopsis to agriculture: engineering improved Vitamin E content in soybean

For more than 80 years, tocopherols have been known to be an essential nutrient, vitamin E, for humans and animals. Work in recent years has concentrated on dissecting tocopherol biosynthesis to engineer the pathway in agricultural crops. Molecular dissection of the pathway in plants is now complete with the cloning and characterization of the gene for Arabidopsis MPBQ/MSBQ methyltransferase (VITAMIN E 3; VTE3). Alison Van Eennemaan and colleagues used seed-specific expression of two vitamin E pathway methyltransferases to engineer increased vitamin E activity in soybeans.