BBSRC Studentship: The role of cell wall structure in determining sustainable bioalcohol production from lignocellulose

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Commercial exploitation of straw co-products for bio-alcohol production requires improvement in the levels and ease of enzymatic digestibility of plant cell wall carbohydrates. The morphological characteristics and chemical composition of wheat and oilseed rape stems vary between varieties and are being studied across ~48 lines of each crop species in the BBSRC Integrated Biorefinery Technologies Initiative (IBTI) Club project “Optimization of wheat and oilseed rape straw co-products for bio-alcohol production”.
The plant cell wall is the common structural entity here since it is the range of material properties of the wall that determines stem strength and fracture properties, and it is the polysaccharide component of the cell wall which provides the source of sugars for fermentation. There is a paucity of information how the cell wall archestructure, and interpolymeric cross-linking affect such digestibility. This project will focus on elucidating the underlying role(s) of plant structure (macro- through to polymer) in manifesting the genetically-determined differences in phenotype, harvesting and ease of enzymatic digestion for bioalcohol production.

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