New Way to Reduce Plant Lignin Could Lead to Cheaper Biofuels

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have shown for the first time that an enzyme can be tweaked to reduce lignin in plants. Their technique could help lower the cost of converting biomass into carbon-neutral fuels to power your car and other sustainably developed bio-products. Lignin is a polymer that's important to a plant's health and structure. But lignin also permeates plant cell walls and surrounds the sugars trapped inside. This poses a major challenge in efforts to use microbes to ferment the sugar into useful chemicals and fuels. That's because lignin must be chemically broken down in a costly pretreatment step before the sugar is fermented. The less lignin there is in a plant, the cheaper this pretreatment step becomes, which is a major goal of the bioenergy industry.