The study was conducted by researchers from the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and New York's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. They started with an existing type of duckweed known as Lemna japonica, to which they added multiple genes which were already known to drive oil production and storage in other plants.

In what is described as a push/pull/protect effect, one of those genes pushes (increases) the production of fatty acids, one of them pulls (assembles) those fatty acids into triacylglycerol oils, and another protects them from environmental degradation by coating the oil droplets in plant tissue. As a result, the engineered duckweed accumulates oil at almost 10% of its dry weight biomass, which is reportedly a 100-fold increase over the accumulation rate of the plant's wild counterpart.