Opportunities and Challenges to Realize the Full Biomass Potential of Bioenergy Crops
A special issue of Agronomy (ISSN 2073-4395). This special issue belongs to the section "Grassland and Pasture Science".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 January 2022) | Viewed by 411
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Future economic sustainability will be dependent on much more biomass utilization. In this context, a steady interest is devoted to seeking the most suited bioenergy crops. C4 grasses such as maize, Miscanthus, switch grass, sorghum and sugarcanes have great potential as dedicated biomass crops due to their high productivity. To realize the opportunity that the utilization of C4 energy grasses present, agricultural productivity needs to be improved, and the quality of the feedstock in many cases needs to be modified. There is a growing exploitation of soluble carbohydrates as a fermentation substrate to produce biofuel and other valuable chemicals. Progress to fully exploit the lignocellulosic component has been lagging despite the realization that utilization of this component will have limited impact on cereal commodities and sugar production.
Biomass production in grasses is directly related to the physiology of sink–source dynamics and whole-plant carbohydrate partitioning. The composition of the biomass is directly related to carbon partitioning within the cell. We still have a limited understanding of the molecular, genetic, and physiological mechanisms that regulate biomass production and carbon partitioning between the different cellular components. Developments in high throughput -omics technologies, molecular markers, genome sequences, genetic transformation, gene editing, and phenomics holds much promise to significantly increase the rate of progress to fully realize the full biomass potential of the C4-bioenergy grasses.
We are inviting research papers (articles), reviews, communications.
Prof. Dr. Frederik Botha
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- biomass
- sink–source
- carbon partitioning
- gene expression
- genome
- molecular markers
- gene editing
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