The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Biological and Environmental Research has teamed with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture’sAgriculture and Food Research Initiative to fund projects that accelerate plant breeding programs and improve biomass feedstocks by characterizing the genes, proteins, and molecular interactions that influence biomass production.
Biomass feedstocks are fast-growing trees, shrubs, and grasses that are bred for the specific purpose of producing energy (electricity or liquid fuels) from all or part of the resulting plant. For biofuels to become economically viable as mainstream fuels, the total amount of lignocellulosic biomass produced per acre per year must be maximized, as does the amount of fuel produced per unit of biomass. At the same time, these crops must be environmentally sustainable, requiring far fewer inputs—pesticide and herbicide applications, fertilizer, water, and the use of energy-consuming farm equipment—than are needed, for example, for the corn and soybean crops currently used to produce ethanol and biodiesel.
Major agricultural crops grown today for food, feed, and fiber in the United States have not been bred for biofuels, so many carefully selected traits—such as a high ratio of seed to straw production—are disadvantageous in biofuel production. However, significant advances in breeding, molecular genetics, and genomic technologies provide an opportunity to build upon the existing knowledge base of plant biology to be able to confidently predict and manipulate the biological function of biomass feedstocks for bioenergy resources.
To capitalize on this potential, DOE and USDA initiated a competitive grant program in 2006 to support fundamental research in biomass genomics. Ultimately, the research seeks to develop and demonstrate environmentally acceptable crops and cropping systems for producing large quantities of low-cost, high-quality biomass feedstocks.
Program Goal
The overall goal is genomics-based research leading to improved use of biomass and plant feedstocks for the production of fuels such as ethanol or renewable chemical feedstocks. Specific goals include
- Improve biomass characteristics, biomass yield, or sustainability, water and nitrogen use efficiency
- Understand carbon partitioning and nutrient cycling in feedstocks
- Enhance fundamental knowledge of structure, function, and organization of feedstock plant genomes
- Enable plants to be efficiently bred or manipulated for such use
Source: U.S. Department of Energy
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