Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
hydrolysis of Brachypodium cell wall material. This work thus establishes a pretreatment method
that can be used to screen for variations—even subtle ones—in the recalcitrance of Brachypodium
biomass (Gomez et al. 2008). Further studies applying the tools of cell wall analysis and the
techniques of biofuel production to Brachypodium will help to meet the challenge of improving
bioenergy feedstocks.
23.6 Future PersPectIves
Brachypodium is rapidly gaining in utility and acceptance as a model grass species. A critical mass
of resources and researchers using Brachypodium has been achieved, and this trend will likely
accelerate with the completion of the genome sequence. In addition to Brachypodium's relevance
to bioenergy, over 30 research papers in the previous 3 years alone have used Brachypodium to
investigate topics as diverse as microRNAs (Unver and Budak 2009; Wei et al. 2009), comparative
genomics (Bortiri et al. 2008; Huo et al. 2009; Kumar et al. 2009), characteristics of introduced
populations (Bakker et al. 2009), and seed storage proteins (Laudencia-Chingcuanco and Vensel
2008). The interest in Brachypodium is also reflected in the large number of people—approximately
75 individuals from more than 20 laboratories—who have recently contributed to the Brachypodium
genome annotation effort (International Brachypodium Initiative 2010). In summary, Brachypodium
combines the desirable attributes of a model organism with many of the traits of interest for
the development and improvement of biofuel feedstocks. Although not itself a bioenergy crop,
Brachypodium is an accessible, informative representative of the grasses, a group of plants that are
tremendously important to the future of bioenergy.
acknoW ledGments
This word was supported by USDA CRIS project 5325-21000-013-00. “Biotechnological
Enhancement of Energy Crops” and by the Office of Science (BER), US Department of Energy,
Interagency Agreement No. DE-AI02-07ER64452. Jenniferm N. Bragg and Ludmila Tyler contrib-
uted equally to this work as co-first authors.
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