Deconstructing Plant Cell Walls to Understand Refined Energy Potential

 

According to an article published this week on the Penn State University (Pennsylvania, USA) website, the vast majority of plant biomass goes unused. A huge amount of the structural parts of crops -- things like cornstalks, sugar canes, beanstalks, and wheat stems -- are discarded because we haven't figured out a way to convert them into fuel.

Plant scientist Daniel Cosgrove, who has devoted decades to studying the cell walls that make plant matter resistant to chemical conversion, thinks it doesn't have to be that way. Given the scale of our need for energy and the size of that untapped, renewable resource, he says that "plant cell walls are the obvious target. The problem is, we don't understand cell wall structure well enough to approach its conversion scientifically," he adds.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) agrees with Cosgrove. In 2009, the agency funded three Energy Frontier Research Centers geared toward finding a good way to turn wood and fibrous plant material into liquid fuel. Two of the programs focus on trying to break down cell walls. The third, the Center for Lignocellulose Structure and Formation headquartered at Penn State, looks at the problem from the opposite perspective—how cell walls are made in the first place. The idea is that understanding how cell walls are made will make it easier for us to take them apart.

"We have a unique angle and a unique group of investigators, mostly from Penn State but also from five other institutions," said Cosgrove, the Center's director. "We're doing a variety of trans-disciplinary work that involves physicists and computational modelers and biologists and geneticists. We're interested in the fundamental problems of how cell walls are put together, because it's not just biochemistry that determines cell wall properties."

More Information is available online.