Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Exhibit Hall
The overall recalcitrance of lignocellulosic biomass to hydrothermal pretreatment and subsequent enzymatic deconstruction represents a significant cost barrier to the widespread development of biofuels technologies. To explore the concept of the efficacy of in planta expression in this regard, we have generated a library of genes coding several key glycoside hydrolases from a variety of sources and transformed A. thaliana using a constitutive promoter which targets expression to the cell wall. One hypothesis proposed is that in planta expression of members from specific glycoside hydrolase families allows these enzymes to access their substrates during cell wall construction, rendering cellulose more amenable to subsequent pretreatment and enzyme digestion. We found that transformed A. thaliana plants were healthy and developed normally compared with the wild type. After hydrothermal pretreatment and enzyme digestion, most transformed plants were more digestible than the respective wild type plants. This result suggests that the expression of specific glycoside hydrolases during cell wall synthesis alters the inherent recalcitrance of the cell wall.