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A Better Route to Xylan

By Guest PostNovember 13, 2012Sciencealex schultink, aromatic compound, atmosphere, biofuel, biofuel generation, biomass, carbon, cell wall, cellulose, cellulosic biofuel, component, coumaric acid, dawn chiniquy, dwarf phenotype, earth, extraction, ferulic, gene, glycosyltransferases, gt61 enzymes, henrik scheller, jbei, lignin, material, metric tons, pamela ronald, plant, rice, saccharification, solar energy, store, sugar, vaishali sharma, xax1, xax1 mutant, xylan, xylan chain

Joint BioEnergy Institute Researchers Find New Access to Abundant Biomass for Advanced Biofuels

After cellulose, xylan is the most abundant biomass material on Earth, and therefore represents an enormous potential source of stored solar energy for the production of advance biofuels. A major roadblock, however, has been extracting xylan from plant cell walls. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have taken a significant step towards removing this roadblock by identifying a gene in rice plants whose suppression improves both the extraction of xylan and the overall release of the sugars needed to make biofuels.

The newly identified gene – dubbed XAX1 – acts to make xylan less extractable from plant cell walls. JBEI researchers, working with a mutant variety of rice plant – dubbed xax1 – in which the XAX1 gene has been “knocked-out” found that not only was xylan more extractable, but saccharification – the breakdown of carbohydrates into releasable sugars – also improved by better than 60-percent. Increased saccharification is key to more efficient production of advanced biofuels. (more…)

Handful of Heavyweight Trees Per Acre Are Forest Champs

Big trees three or more feet in diameter accounted for nearly half the biomass measured at a Yosemite National Park site, yet represented only 1 percent of the trees growing there.

This means just a few towering white fir, sugar pine and incense cedars per acre at the Yosemite site are disproportionately responsible for photosynthesis, converting carbon dioxide into plant tissue and sequestering that carbon in the forest, sometimes for centuries, according to James Lutz, a University of Washington research scientist in environmental and forest sciences. He’s lead author of a paper on the largest quantitative study yet of the importance of big trees in temperate forests being published online May 2 on PLoS ONE. (more…)

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A Better Route to Xylan

Handful of Heavyweight Trees Per Acre Are Forest Champs