**1. Introduction**

Over the last decades, the adoption of oilseed crops has been growing up significantly due to industry interest in the composition of their seed oils, which are made up of a wide range of fatty acids with six predominant types: 16 or 18 carbon palmitic, stearic, oleic, linoleic and linolenic acids, and 12 carbon lauric acid, as well as other unusual fatty acids produced by wild plant species include those with chain lengths between 8 and 24 carbons [1]. Due to their

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

structure and composition, those oils are used as food/industrial feed [2] and as a range of product applications such as surfactants, soap, detergents, lubricants, solvents, paints, inks, chemical feedstocks and cosmetics [1]. In this study, a review about the main advances in genetic improvement of oilseed crops, starting with omics to understand metabolic routes and to find out key genes in seed oil production, and also, getting in use of modern biotechnology including genetic engineering and new breeding techniques (NBTs), a modern-breeding tool that has allowed the functional study of genes with potential application for breeding in agriculture, focusing on oilseed crop genetic improvement with high precision and less uncertainty (avoiding whole genomes crossing), and of course, in less time is presented; those scientific efforts where it was sought to upset fatty acids production or biotic tolerance will also be presented.
