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Engineering plants for biofuels
Date:11/26/2012

With increasing demands for sustainable energy, being able to cost-efficiently produce biofuels from plant biomass is more important than ever. However, lignin and hemicelluloses present in certain plants mean that they cannot be easily converted into biofuels. A study published in BioMed Central's open access journal Biotechnology for Biofuels appears to have solved this problem, using gene manipulation techniques to engineer plants that can be more easily broken down into biofuels.

Plants high in lignin and hemicelluloses lignocellulosic biomass have a high content of pentose sugars that are more difficult to ferment into fuels than plants with hexose sugars. In order to be useful for biofuel production, scientists need to be able to engineer plants with smaller amounts of xylan the major non-cellulosic polysaccharide present in secondary cell walls.

With this in mind, a research group from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA, used 3 mutant strains of Arabidopsis deficient in xylan irregular xylem (irx) mutants irx7, irx8 and irx9 in order to engineer plants with low xylan content and improved properties for easier breakdown of carbohydrate into simple sugars (saccharification). The irx mutants normally exhibit severe dwarf phenotypes that result from xylem vessel collapse and consequent impaired transport of water and nutrients. The team hypothesized that restoring xylan biosynthesis in the plants would complement the mutations.

To reintroduce xylan biosynthesis into the xylem of irx7, 8 and 9, Henrik Scheller and colleagues manipulated the promoter regions of vessel-specific VND6 and VND7 transcription factor genes. Significantly, they found that the ensuing phenotypes completely restored wild-type growth patterns in some cases, resulting in stronger plants with restored mechanical properties, whilst at the same time maintaining a low overall xylan content and improved saccharification properties that all
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Contact: Hilary Glover
hilary.glover@biomedcentral.com
44-020-319-22370
BioMed Central
Source:Eurekalert  

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