A Better Route to Xylan: Researchers Find New Access to Abundant Biomass for Advanced Biofuels
Date: 15.11.2012
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.
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.
Scheller is a co-author of a paper describing this work that has been published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper is titled "XAX1 from glycosyltransferase family 61 mediates Xylosyl transfer to rice xylan."
