Strategies to overcome biomass recalcitrance at the Bioenergy Science Center

The primary goal of the BioEnergy Science Center (BESC) is to enable the emergence of a sustainable cellulosic biofuels industry by leading advances in science and science-based innovation resulting in removal of recalcitrance as an economic barrier. This overview of the center will discuss advances that have been made in our two focused approaches to overcoming recalcitrance: the development of microbial strains capable of consolidated bioprocessing, and the development of improved feedstocks for biofuels.  However, recalcitrance, or overcoming the inability to easily access the sugars and other monomers from cellulosic sources in order to make fuels or other products, is one of the major challenges for cost-effective biofuel production.  Transformative advances to understand biomass recalcitrance require detailed scientific knowledge of (1) the chemical and physical properties of biomass that influence recalcitrance, (2) how these properties are altered in engineered or native plant biosynthetic pathways in Populus and switchgrass, and (3) how cellulolytic anaerobic microorganisms are effective in biomass deconstruction as can be improved in their fuel production. The multidisciplinary and multi-institutional BESC team is applying the knowledge gained from these activities to carry out approaches based on both improved plant and microbial components to improve generation of fuels from biomass resources as well as enabling technologies.