Discovery could yield more efficient plants for biofuels
Clint Chapple, distinguished professor of biochemistry, and fellow researchers generated a mutant Arabidopsis plant whose cell walls can be converted easily into fermentable sugars but does not display the stunted growth patterns of similar mutants. The finding could maintain yield while reducing the need for costly pretreatment processes that make cellulosic biofuels more inefficient to produce than corn ethanol.
"This study opens the door to a whole new set of technologies we never could have imagined," Chapple said. "This finding is not the silver bullet that will suddenly make the wide-scale production of cellulosic biofuels possible, but it is a very important step forward."
Cellulosic biofuels are made from the sugars in the cell walls of wood, grasses and the inedible parts of plants. But production of cost-efficient cellulosic biofuels is currently limited by lignin, the compound that gives plants strength and structural integrity. Lignin binds tightly to the main component of plant cell walls, cellulose, which is made of simple sugars. Freeing cellulose from lignin so that it can be broken down into sugars and fermented into fuel requires expensive and complicated pretreatment processes.
The study was published Sunday (March 16) in Nature and is available at www.nature.com
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