6-07: High throughput characterization of plant biomass through glycome profiling using cell wall glycan-directed monoclonal antibodies

Plant biomass is the major renewable raw material for the production of ligno-cellulosic bio-fuels. Plant cell walls constitute the bulk of this plant biomass. Understanding the structure, chemistry and biosynthesis of plant cell walls is thus key in developing novel biomass raw materials that are suitable for bio-fuel production. Novel characterization tools are a pre-requisite for studying plant cell walls because of its extreme complexity. Plant cell wall glycan-directed monoclonal antibodies have now emerged as a very reliable tool in studying plant cell wall structure and formation. The current worldwide collection of ~200 such monoclonal antibodies are broad enough to study structures of most major classes of plant cell wall polysaccharides. In this study, we describe a fast, reliable and high through put ELISA based technique that uses a toolkit of ~150 monoclonal antibodies to characterize various plant biomass samples. The method involves an initial step of sequential extraction of plant biomass samples with an increasing harshness of reagents and subsequent ELISA screening of these fraction with the above toolkit of cell wall glycan directed monoclonal antibodies. The method also promises more applications in evaluating the recalcitrance behavior of biomass samples and effect/s of pretreatments on biomass samples.