Nov. 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 deficie