Combining Agriculture with Microbial Genomics To Make Fuels

Despite major challenges, we believe that cellulosic sugars in agricultural waste are the best sustainable source for biofuels to meet world wide energy needs. One key challenge involves dealing with diverse cellulosic sugars, many with high levels of lignin. Other tough challenges include converting both 5-and 6-carbon sugars efficiently into ethanol and recycling carbon dioxide from fermentations back into useful biomass. We would like to develop “integrated biorefineries” that will use residual biomass from conventional crops and also harness microbial genomics to identify enzymes with which to process biomass produced in marginal lands with much greater efficiency than is now possible.