A pair of scientists from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has discovered a method that allows an exceptionally high level of control over genetically modified plants.

This means that specific tissues of a plant can be made to enhance desired traits. For example, a rubber tree could be modified to produce more natural rubber or food grains such as wheat could be made to produce more grains in a given area.

Like Us on Facebook

Researchers Henrik Scheller and Dominique Loqué have launched Afingen, a startup company which will apply the new technology for developing cheap biofuels that could potentially rival the cost of corn ethanol and gasoline.

"With this tool we seem to have found a way to control very specifically what tissue or cell type expresses whatever we want to express," said Scheller.

"It's a new way that people haven't thought about to increase metabolic pathways. It could be for making more cell wall, for increasing the stress tolerance response in a specific tissue. We think there are many different applications."

Earlier in the year, Afingen was awarded US$1.72 million in a Small Business Innovation Research grant to develop switchgrass plants that would have 40 percent less lignin and 20 percent more fermentable sugar in selected structures.

"Techno-economic modeling done at (the Joint BioEnergy Institute, or JBEI) has shown that you would get a 23 percent reduction in the price of the biofuel with just a 20 percent reduction in lignin," said Loqué.

"If we could also increase the sugar content and make it easier to extract, that would reduce the price even further. But of course it also depends on the downstream efficiency."

Both scientists are plant biologists at the Department of Energy's Joint BioEnergy Institute, a research center led by Berkeley Lab established in 2007 to search for breakthroughs in the creation of biofuels from cellulosic sources.

TagsBiofuel, Improved crops, Genetics, genetic modification, Plants, Biofuels