The abundance of non-edible corn parts in the U.S. could be put to good use in developing sustainable biofuels through the research of two U. California-Berkeley scientists – who will receive a three-year $793,413 federal grant to support their work, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Energy released Sept. 2.
The energy department and the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded Plant and Microbiology adjunct professor Sarah Hake and Plant and Microbial Biology associate professor Markus Pauly the funds to find the best way to use parts of corn, other than the kernel, for the production of biofuels. The grant is part of a program by the energy and agriculture departments aimed at improving the creation of plants suited for clean energy and ultimately decreasing dependence on foreign oil.
Pauly said corn is grown “quite substantially” in the U.S., mainly for cattle feed and ethanol biofuel production, but only the kernel of the plant is being used. He said the cell wall makes up about 80 percent of the crop and could be used as material for better forms of biofuels that would have less greenhouse gas emissions than ethanol fuels produced from kernel starch.
“You have a direct competition between food and feed industry and the biofuel industry,” he said. “We want to say, ‘why don’t we use the rest of the plant but not the kernel?’ It’s basically left to rot in the field.”
Pauly and Hake will hire two researchers to analyze the genetic diversity of maize to find which strains of the plant have the qualities – such as high sugar content, which is fermented to ethanol – to produce the most efficient biofuels. Pauly said corn is a good crop to test for biofuel production because of its high genetic diversity with 25 parent lines.
“It has a genetic diversity of 4 percent, which is more than what is between the human and the chimpanzee,” he said.
Once the best strains are identified, they will be genetically crossed together to produce the best strain biofuels.
The researchers will also be looking to discover the genetic basis for why certain strains have these qualities, which could in turn determine how to produce other plants with the right characteristics for making biofuels, Pauly said.
Though the ultimate goal for discovering new biofuels is to replace fossil fuels, thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel imports, Pauly said ethanol is not the ideal substitute.
“Corn is not the most perfect plant, but it’s a good start,” he said. “We can take these traits and put them into other plants. Corn is something we want to learn from to put these traits into other plants.”
Once the best traits and strains are identified, Pauly and Hake will work with engineers to figure out how best to extract the sugars for ethanol production because cell walls are hard to “digest” or break down. The engineers’ work will not be funded by the grant.
Jamie Cate, UC Berkeley associate professor of chemistry, biochemistry and molecular biology, is involved in the ongoing research which has found a way to break down cell walls for sugar extraction and ethanol production by using fungi, a technique which he said will benefit Hake and Pauly’s studies.
“This whole question of plant biology is really fundamental to the problem, and we don’t know yet how to do this,” Cate said. “This funded research that they’re doing is a way to take modern technology and approaches in really a brand-new field.”