By TIM THORNBERRY
Kentucky Correspondent LEXINGTON, Ky. — It is no secret that Kentucky is on the forefront of research examining new sources for biofuels but a recent study by the University of Kentucky (UK) may have far-reaching implications in the use of a common weed to create new fuels.
The scientific explanation is a bit complicated to say the least but Seth DeBolt, assistant professor at the UK College of Agriculture’s horticulture department puts it more in layman’s terms.
It was the hope of DeBolt and his research colleagues that the study would result in something positive and after a year of work, the group has gotten their wish.
“We found that we could increase the rate at which cellulose is digested to fermentable sugar and then converted into biofuel by about 150 percent,” said DeBolt. “That’s a fairly dramatic increase, and we were quite surprised.”
The weed or plant in the limelight is Arabidopsis, which is basically the “lab rat” of the plant world. The plant itself would not make a good source for biofuels according to DeBolt.
The value of it, however, is that it can be manipulated easily and because of its size, growth rate and the fact that it can generate many mutations, it allows researchers to work faster than they could with an agricultural crop that can‘t be manipulated quite as easily.
The cellulose in plants is made of sugar and it is gathering of that sugar to make biofuels that is critical. Kentucky has the environment to grow many types of grasses that could potentially be used to produce those biofuels.
“The overall goal is to accelerate the process in our grasses. We’ve found a way to manipulate the cellulose in this little weed and that will then be applied to these grasses,” said DeBolt. “Our main aim is not to compete with food.
The use of corn for ethanol has sparked many discussions of late as corn prices increased and the total amount of the crop being used for ethanol increased as well.
It is that very reason DeBolt, along with other researchers in the state are looking for alternative sources of biomass that are common to the state and easy to grow. Some of those alternatives include switchgrass and eastern gammagrass and even sweet sorghum and poplar trees.
“The genetics (of the Arabidopsis) are suitable for looking at a lot of different genetic mutations,” DeBolt said. “With that in mind, we screened for a plant with altered cellulose, knowing that we wanted to stay away from using a food-source, starchy crop such as corn. We looked for a form of cellulose that’s more easily turned into biofuel. We did this using X-ray scattering and numerous mutations found in the Arabidopsis plant and ended up finding one that had very suitable properties for biofuel.”
While it all is quite scientific, the bottom line of the research is to find the right non-food plants to use and use them efficiently.
DeBolt added that the mutation they identified to get the desired results was nontransgenic, meaning it is not from another plant species or entirely different plant kingdom. He said one of the main things researchers sought to overcome was the actual crystalline structure of cellulose itself.
“Through millions of years of evolution, plant structures developed a structure that resists being broken down by enzymes,” DeBolt said. “If you can get the structure to do that, not to resist, the cellulose is easily converted to a fermentable product to make alcohol – the sugar which comprises the largest part of a plant.
“The plant we found that most readily converts to biofuel was not a transgenic plant. It just had a single base pair mutation in it that made its cellulose naturally less crystalline and more easily broken down.”
While most people wouldn’t fully understand how all this research works, they would understand that the end result could mean unused or fallow land in areas of the state that aren’t conducive to growing more traditional crops, may become agricultural hotbeds for “crops” grown specifically for biofuels.
“The next step and we are in the thick of it, is putting this technology into bio-energy crops like the grasses or woody crops like poplar,” said DeBolt.
His team of researchers are also looking forward to working with other departments within the UK College of Agriculture including plant and soil sciences, biosystems and agriculture engineering and the Kentucky Tobacco Research and Development Center. In doing so the hope is to discover ways to “provide marketable quantities of native plant species that will provide more efficient biomass for biofuel production in a state that’s well suited to producing these types of crops,” according to information from UK.
DeBolts and his team’s findings were recently featured in the Global Change Biology Bioenergy Journal. |
