Scientists for the U.S. Agriculture and Energy Departments are teaming up in the Bay Area to divine the genetic recipe for switchgrass and other potential energy crops, for dramatic boosts in the production of biofuels.
The Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek announced Tuesday that it will be performing a rough listing of genes in switchgrass — the 10-foot grasses that once towered over the American prairie and the San Joaquin Valley — as well as sequencing other organisms useful in producing energy or better understanding those that do.
If the sequencing of prairie grasses identifies as many new genes as researchers expect, scientists might be able to reduce some of the toughest, structural material in those plants and perhaps double or triple the amount of ethanol that can be fermented from them.
"It's going to make a world of difference," said Olin Anderson, a molecular biologist who leads the genomics and gene discovery team at the USDA's Western Regional Research Center in Albany.
The Bush administration has set a goal of replacing up to 30 percent of the nation's current gasoline use with biofuels by 2030 — and bringing the cost of ethanol, the leading alternative fuel, down to $1.07 a gallon by 2012.
So far, ethanol supplies about 2 percent of U.S. transportation fuel demand, and virtually all of it is expensively processed from corn.
If all of the nation's corn were ground and fermented into ethanol, it would supply only about 15 percent of the transportation fuel demand so scientists are looking at a vast array of other, better feedstocks, from switchgrass to poplar trees and pulp wood to manure.
Most derive ethanol from the fibrous, woody stuff of plants, known as cellulosic biomass. Cellulose itself is easy to break down into sugars that can be fermented into fuel, but another type of material in plant cell walls called lignin is bound up with cellulose and resists conversion to fuel.
That resistance has scientists poking into how plants form cell walls at the genetic level.
USDA researchers in Albany have worked backwards from RNA to identify about 12,000 switchgrass genes, of which about a half dozen are involved in making cell walls, Anderson said.
The Joint Genome Institute, run by University of California scientists for the Energy Department, has banks of DNA sequencers ready to search for those genes more deeply and quickly, doubling or tripling those identified.
For the past year, JGI director and Lawrence Berkeley lab biologist Eddy Rubin has talked of turning the power of the institute's mass sequencers to questions of energy production.
The genome institute also plans on sequencing all of the DNA in Brachypodium, a kind of prairie grass that federal researchers in a report on biofuels last week recommended be sequenced as soon as possible. The grass is similar to a number of potential bioenergy plants yet is smaller in both physical size and genetic content and has a faster life cycle. Scientists say that makes it ideal as a kind of lab rat for experiments to find the best genetic recipe for producing biological fuels.
The genome institute also will be sequencing the cassava, another energy crop and a food source for an estimated billion people worldwide, and the oyster mushroom. The mushroom is a white-rot fungus that eats lignin, part of the woody tissue of the plant, and so holds some keys to freeing cellulose for conversion to biofuels.
"Source":[ http://www.orovillemr.com/news/bayarea/ci_4038033]
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