Ecologia, Medio Ambiente y Energias Renovables en la Naturaleza
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Lunes, 21 de Mayo de 2012
A team of researchers from the Energy Biosciences Institute discovered a plant gene that could help fight the production of a fermentation-preventing acid in the process of producing cellulosic ethanol.
The researchers found that a mutation of a gene found in a plant from the mustard and cabbage family causes a reduction of acetylation. Acetylation is the release of acetate during the process of breaking down the lignocelluloses of plants to get to the plant sugars that are then fermented into fuel. Lignocellulose is composed of cellulose, lignin and hemicellulose. It is the latter that releases acetate.
The problem with acetate, an acidic organic compound, is that it does not react well with the microbes that start the fermenting process.
The researchers from the institute, along with colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley were looking for ways to diminish or block the acetate content of biomass in order to allow better processing into biofuels by examining plants on the genetic level. A mutation was found to naturally occur in a population of Arabidopsis plants, showed a 20 to 45 percent reduction of acetylation in their hemicelluloses.
"These genes can be used as genetic markers to facilitate breeding programs that aim to generate biofuel feedstocks with reduced lignocellulosic acetate content," says Markus Pauly, a plant biologist at Berkeley and head of the team.
The researchers mapped the mutation to a physical location in the Arabidopsis genome and named the gene locus AXY4.
As the naturally occurring mutation and the lack of acetylation it indicated does not seem to put the plant at a disadvantage, blocking this function should not harm the plant. It could also open even more sources of non-food biomass for biofuel production. (Katrice R. Jalbuena)
