Technical Report
 

Agronomic Requirements of Euphorbia lagascae: A Potential New Drought-Tolerant Crop for Semi-Arid Oregon: 2011 Results

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  • Euphorbia lagascae (Euphorbiaceae- ‘spurge family’) has been recognized as one of the more promising potential new industrial crops for the drier regions in the temperate zone (Roseberg, 1996). In the late 1950s and early 1960s the USDA analyzed many plant species in search of novel chemical compounds. They first recognized that E. lagascae was unique among the 58 euphorbs tested (and almost unique among all plants) in that the seed oil contained high levels of a C18 epoxy fatty acid (EFA) known as vernolic acid (12,13 epoxy-cis-9-octadecenoic acid) (Kleiman et al., 1965). E. lagascae (hereafter simply called ‘euphorbia’) is a drought-tolerant native of Spain whose seed contains about 45%-50% oil, of which 60%-65% is vernolic acid (Kleiman et al., 1965; Vogel et al., 1993). Vernolic acid is an EFA of great interest to the paint and coating industry as a drying solvent in alkyd resin paints, a plasticizer or additive in polyvinyl chloride (PVC) resins (Riser et al., 1962; Carlson et al., 1981; Carlson and Chang, 1985; Perdue et al., 1986). Paints formulated with vernolic acid emit very low levels of volatile organic compounds (VOC) and thus using such paints would greatly reduce the VOC air pollution that now occurs with volatilization of alkyd resins in conventional paints (Brownback and Glaser, 1992; Anon, 1993). The Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 required the reduction of VOC pollutants, and regulations in California have been implemented earlier with greater effect upon the paint industry. After initially discovering euphorbia’s valuable and nearly unique seed oil, the major problem that hindered both breeding and agronomic research needed to develop euphorbia as a crop has been its violent seed shattering habit, combined with its indeterminate flowering and seed habit, making it difficult both to harvest and to measure seed yield. No wild accessions of euphorbia contain a non-shattering trait (Vogel et al., 1993; Pascual-Villalobos et al., 1994). However, in the early-1990s, chemically induced, non-shattering mutants were developed in Spain (Pascual and Correal, 1992; Pascual-Villalobos et al., 1994; Pascual-Villalobos, 1996). These non-shattering seeds were transferred to Oregon State University in the mid-1990s and formed the basis for research conducted at the Southern Oregon Research & Extension Center (SOREC) and the Klamath Basin Research & Extension Center (KBREC) on a sporadic basis starting in 1995. For more details on euphorbia’s unique properties, crop status, current competitors, and likely uses in industry please refer to a more detailed discussion, including additional references, in our earlier reports (Roseberg and Shuck, 2008 and 2009).
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