Sugarcane is the world’s largest crop by biomass yield, providing 80 percent of the sugar and 40 percent of the biofuel produced worldwide.
Sugarcane is the world’s largest crop by biomass yield, providing 80 percent of the sugar and 40 percent of the biofuel produced worldwide. The plant’s size and efficient use of water and light make it a prime candidate to produce advanced renewable, value-added bioproducts and biofuels.
However, as a hybrid of Saccharum officinarum and Saccharum spontaneum, sugarcane has the most complex genome of all crops. This complexity means that improving sugarcane through conventional breeding is challenging. Because of this, researchers turn to gene editing tools, such as the CRISPR/Cas9 system to precisely target the sugarcane genome for improvement.
In their new paper, published in Plant Biotechnology Journal, a team of researchers from the University of Florida at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) has leveraged this genetic complexity to their advantage to use the CRISPR/Cas9 system to fine-tune leaf angle in sugarcane. These genetic tweaks allowed the sugarcane to capture more sunlight, which in turn increased the amount of biomass produced.
This work supports the DOE-funded CABBI Bioenergy Research Center’s “plants as factories” approach and the primary goal of its Feedstock Production research — to synthesize biofuels, bioproducts, and high-value molecules directly in the stems of plants such as sugarcane.
Read more at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment
Photo Credit: sarangib via Pixabay
