Dulles, Virginia
September 15, 2005
Edenspace Systems
Corporation announced today that it has signed a Cooperative
Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S.
Department of Agriculture to develop new crop plants for ethanol
production. The Western Regional Research Center of the U.S.
Department of Agricultureís Agricultural Research Service,
located in Albany, California, will carry out USDA's activities
under the CRADA.
The United States of America currently imports 55% of its
petroleum, representing 45% of the total trade deficit.
Decreasing petroleum imports by developing renewable energy
sources will stimulate the economy, increase energy security,
and reduce the quantity of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse
gases released into the atmosphere. An increasingly important
renewable energy source is ethanol produced from starch in corn
grain. More than 4 billion gallons of fuel ethanol will be
produced in 2005, with a national target of 7.5 billion gallons
by 2012.
Two constraints limit future demand for fuel ethanol: high
processing costs, and low ethanol yields per acre. Current
technology based on fermentation of sugars from starch in corn
grain offers limited opportunity to address these constraints.
New technologies based on using the entire plant, not just
grain, offer an excellent pathway to reduce processing costs as
well as to increase efficient use of farmland.
Since 2003, Edenspace has been engineering crops to enhance
their energy performance by incorporating genes that express
cellulases, thereby reducing the cost of producing ethanol from
plant biomass. Cellulases are biodegradable enzymes that 'unzip'
cellulose (which like the starch in corn grain consists of a
long chain of sugar molecules) into the sugars that can be
fermented into ethanol. Integrating high-efficiency cellulase
energy crops with fuel ethanol production and distribution
systems is projected to nearly double per-acre ethanol yields,
reduce the cost of fuel ethanol by 20%, increase farm income by
25%, and relax pressures on farmland availability. Other
expected benefits include cleaner air and productive use of
agricultural byproducts such as cotton waste and rice straw that
today impose significant costs on farmers and the environment.
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Switchgrass, a perennial high
biomass grass that grows throughout much of the U.S., has been
proposed as a promising biomass fuel crop. As switchgrass is
native to the Great Plains of the U.S., has wide adaptability to
marginal soils, and grows vigorously (with annual biomass yields
of 10-20 tons/hectare) it is often used as a riparian buffer
crop and as a vegetative cover for bare soil in environmental
programs such as USDA's Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).
Switchgrass selection and breeding efforts to date, notably at
the University of Nebraska, have focused on improving disease
resistance, forage quality and biomass yields, leading to the
development of upland and lowland varieties suitable for biomass
or forage production (Fig. 1). Molecular breeding approaches
initiated at the University of Tennessee are currently being
continued at the Western Regional Research Center.
The cooperative agreement announced today will expand molecular
breeding approaches to develop switchgrass varieties with
improved biomass qualities for ethanol production. Edenspace and
the Center will collaborate in general on research to explore
genes, traits and mechanisms that are potentially useful for
renewable energy production, and in particular on research that
will lead to commercial introduction of enhanced switchgrass
varieties as an ethanol feedstock. The immediate goal of this
research is to create switchgrass lines expressing cellulases
and other enzymes that will be active during postharvest
processing and decrease the costs of making fuel ethanol. To
prevent unwanted flow of cellulase genes into the environment,
methods of bioconfinement will be incorporated into these lines.
The Western Regional Research Center conducts mission-oriented
research directed in part at protecting and enhancing the
quality of the environment by developing environmentally sound
systems for efficient biomass utilization in biofuels such as
ethanol. Ongoing projects include several that seek to increase
the energy potential of switchgrass, involving the alteration of
activity in key lignin biosynthetic enzymes, cell wall
biosynthesis, and techniques for bioconfinement of transgenes.
Headquartered in Dulles, Virginia, Edenspace Systems
Corporation is a commercial leader in the use of live plants to
improve human health, protect property values and clean the
environment. Its techniques employ plants to detect, concentrate
and remove lead, arsenic, radionuclides, chlorides (salts),
hydrocarbons, and other minerals in water and soil, as well as
to produce plants with traits that improve yields of renewable
energy sources such as ethanol. With expertise in plant science,
environmental and soil science, genetics and agronomy, Edenspace
is developing new markets for the restoration and enrichment of
our surroundings. |
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