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A tree that can reach 90 feet in six years and be grown as a row crop on fallow farmland could offer a major replacement for fossil fuels.
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With funding from the Department of Energy, Purdue Agriculture scientists Clint Chapple (left) and Rick Meilan use genetic tools to find ways to convert trees into ethanol as a replacement for fossil fuels.
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Purdue Agriculture researchers are using genetic tools in an effort to design trees that can readily and inexpensively yield the substances needed to produce alternative transportation fuel. The scientists are focused on a compound in cell walls called "lignin" that contributes to plants' structural strength, but which hinders extraction of potentially valuable cellulose. Cellulose is the sugar-containing component needed to make the alternative fuel ethanol.
The Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research is funding a $1.4 million, three-year study by Purdue Agriculture faculty Clint Chapple, Richard Meilan and Michael Ladisch. Chapple and Meilan will genetically modify a hybrid poplar tree so that lignin will not impede the release of cellulose for degradation into fermentable sugars, which then can be converted to ethanol. Ladisch will determine if the changes have created trees suitable for high-yield ethanol production.
The energy department's goal is to replace 30 percent of the fossil fuel used for transportation in the United States with biofuels by 2030. Purdue scientists and experts at the U.S. departments of Agriculture and Energy say corn can only be part of the solution to the problem of replacing fossil fuel.
"If Indiana wants to support only corn-based ethanol production, we would have to import corn," says Chapple, a biochemist. "What we need is a whole set of plants that are well-adapted to particular growing regions and have high levels of productivity for use in biofuel production."
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