Genomics strategies on biomass to biofuels

Based on the cover storty on C&EN, BESC's 300 scientists located at federal labs, academic institutions, companies, and nonprofit organizations across the country have been given the challenge of designing a path through the lignocellulosics recalcitrance problem.

Deconstructing lignocellulose to accessible sugars followed by chemical or fermentation processes is considered to be the most practical pathway to biofuels. However, pretreatment is a very expensive step in the process for biofuel production. So their efforts are to eliminate or significantly reduce the amount of pretreatment needed. One of the approaches is to ultimately come up with plants that are more easily digested and might need just a hot-water pretreatment without chemicals. A second approach is to engineer a multitalented microbe that can disassemble the plant cell wall and ferment the resulting sugars into biofuel in one go, a strategy known as consolidated bioprocessing. This type of one-organism, one-pot process could be a major breakthrough for low-cost production of ethanol or other fuels and chemicals.

BESC's approach to conquering recalcitrance has started with a major study on a fast-growing poplar tree from the Pacific Northwest and switchgrass native to the prairies of North America. Because no single parameter characterizes recalcitrance, the standard operating procedure is to screen multiple plant samples under a variety of conditions and measure the amount of sugar produced at the end of each test run.