Recently, the Energy Crop Molecular Breeding Research Group led by Fu Chunxiang, a researcher at the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Processes, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has made research on the regulation mechanism of lignin synthesis through special resource screening, mutant identification and lignin genetic engineering regulation. The new results have obtained a number of plant resources with high cell wall degradation efficiency and potential commercial utilization value.
Due to the presence of lignin in the cell wall of vascular plants, polysaccharides with important economic value such as abundant cellulose and hemicellulose in the cell wall are difficult to be fully utilized, thereby restricting the production efficiency of animal husbandry, papermaking and bioenergy. At the same time, it also caused waste of resources and environmental pollution.
Lignin is mainly found in straw and wood. Each year, there are more than 700 million tons of straw produced in China's agricultural production, and about 360 million tons of corn stalks. How to turn waste into treasure, use corn and other high-efficiency and low-cost Crop straw has become a research and development hotspot in the field of biomass resource utilization in the world.
The research by Fu Chunxiang's team showed that by regulating the metabolism of the methyl donor coupled to the lignin synthesis pathway, the synthesis of lignin can be significantly changed, and the efficiency of cell wall transformation and utilization can be improved.
This research work has deepened people's understanding of the regulation of lignin synthesis, and provided a new research and development direction for the current regulation of lignin synthesis. The genetic resources, technical systems and germplasm resources related to the research work also formed independent intellectual property rights. And carried out a patent declaration.
In the future, further deep digestion and utilization of the above-mentioned genetic resources will help to cultivate more new varieties of energy and feed crops with low cost and high conversion efficiency through molecular design breeding.
