The low erucic acid content of rapeseed B. napus (‘0’ quality) originates from a spontaneous low erucic
mutant of the German forage rapeseed cultivar ‘Liho’ (B. napus), which was discovered in Canada when searching the world’s germplasm for its oil quality. Thespontaneousmutationblockedthebiosynthesisof eicosenoic and erucic acids. The result was moderately high oleic oil with low erucic acid content. The mutant was used to develop low erucic rapeseed cultivars ‘Oro’ (B. napus) in 1968 and ‘Span’ (B. rapa) in 1971 (Downey, 1990). While the rapeseed oil quality was bred into suitable cultivars, efforts were made by breeders to improve the meal quality by reducing the antinutritional glucosinolates. The trait for low glucosinolate content of the meal was discovered in germplasm of the Polish summer B. napus cultivar ‘Bronowski’ in 1967, which was utilized to develop low erucic, low glucosinolate (‘00’) cultivars. Similarly, canola quality was developed in B. rapa (Canola Connection, 2001) and recently in B. campestris using spontaneous mutants and intra- and inter-specific hybridization(Potts et al., 1999)