**5. Nonconventional tools and techniques**

Recent advances in next-generation sequencing technologies (NGS) have encouraged rapid development of bioenergy crops. Different new "omics" technologies (genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and metagenomics), marker-aided selection (MAS), and genetic engineering approaches have been considered and are widely used as the most promising solutions to improve agronomic traits in bioenergy oil plants. "Omics" technologies can accelerate and be used for the identification of novel and useful genes responsible for oil production, to discover oil production pathways including mapping of significant QTLs in the family [33] and also to improve oil content and composition [34]. The tremendous efforts in terms of genome analysis have been done in Crucifereae family [35]. To facilitate such efforts, whole genomes of some oil plants including soybean [36], rapeseed [37] sunflower [38], castor [39], Jatropha [40], oil palm [41, 42], Camelina [43] have been already sequenced. Such huge deal of data has opened a new high-throughput way to discover


#### **Table 1.**

*Nonconventional/biotechnological efforts.*

*Nature of Importance of Various Parameters for Ideal Biofuel Crops: Special Reference… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.107102*

**Figure 2.**

*Conventional and nonconventional approaches to improve fatty acid profile in oilseeds.*

genes and pathways involved in oil production as well as the genes affecting oil quality in these plants. Moreover, by using omics technologies, such as quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping, single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), and expressed sequence tag (EST)-based molecular markers, cDNA libraries, and RNA-seq analysis, researchers could identify and characterize genes involved in lipid synthesis pathways, tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses, and the other important traits (Tang et al., 2017) [27], and similar few nonconventional efforts are summarized in **Table 1**.

This chapter creates the two paths that cross each other while selection and development of ideal biofuel crops in conventional and nonconventional ways. The strategies are not only based upon the extraction and utilization of oil but first going into the system of plants using genetic dissection methods that can delineate the mechanisms of gene responsible for the development of useful fatty acid profile. The triggers can be developed to identify useful genes, thereby understanding their expression profiling in **Figure 2**.
