Monday, April 19, 2010
LL Conference Facility (Hilton Clearwater Beach)
In the development of improved energy crop varieties, obtaining accurate chemical composition and conversion performance characteristics will be critical. A small laboratory-scale, high-throughput assay has been developed that can be used to assess the relative conversion efficiency of sorghum biomass samples. Acidic pretreatment methods have been employed, and the assay is reproducible at the milligram scale. Ceres has available hundreds of sorghum samples, and the biomass collected from a subset of these lines has been assessed for relative digestibility in Ceres’ small-scale conversion assays. Lines with distinct differences in sugar released per gram dry biomass and/or in percent of theoretical sugar yields can be identified. This conversion assay provides a direct means to identify sorghum lines with superior conversion characteristics, leading to higher final sugar yields. This information will be invaluable to breeders and genetic engineers in the design of improved energy crop varieties.