DOE Bioenergy Center Special Issue. The Bioenergy Sciences Center (BESC)

Abstract

This issue of BioEnergy Research is the first of three special issues to feature work from the US Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Centers. In June 2006, the DOE's Genomes to Life Program published a report, entitled “Breaking the biological barriers to cellulosic ethanol: a joint research agenda,” that outlined research areas requiring significant investment in order to meet the target of making cellulosic ethanol cost-competitive by 2012. Words were converted to action in June 2007 when Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman announced the establishment of three new Bioenergy Research Centers. Each center was to receive $135 million over 5 years. The successful competitors for this funding were the Bioenergy Sciences Center (BESC) coordinated from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, the Joint Bio-Energy Institute coordinated from the DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center coordinated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The concurrent provision of a $500 million grant from British Petroleum to fund the Energy Biosciences Institute, involving the University of California at Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois, completed this unprecedented response to addressing the political, economic, and environmental challenges associated with moving away from an oil-based economy. As outlined in the following article by Davison et al. (pp. 177–178), BESC is multi-institutional consortium with a highly focused set of goals centered around overcoming the recalcitrance of lignocellulosic biomass to enzymatic and microbial saccharification. These goals will be achieved through multidisciplinary approaches, targeted toward gaining an understanding of how cell wall structure impacts saccharification efficiency, to the development of single microbes, or microbial consortia with improved abilities for biomass deconstruction. Central to BESC's research plan is the deployment of state-of-the-art, high-throughput biomass characterization platforms. The two plant species most studied by BESC, poplar (Populus) and switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), both have a long history with ORNL as target bioenergy crops. Switchgrass received further publicity through being mentioned in President George W. Bush's 2006 State of the Union address. The papers in this volume all come from the biomass improvement and characterization teams within BESC and provide a progress report of early, baseline work primarily on the above two species. The review by Decker et al. (pp. 179–192) describes the problems associated with high-throughput characterization of biomass, and some of the approaches that BESC is taking to develop a pipeline for the analysis of large plant populations such as used in association mapping studies. The following paper by Foston et al. (pp. 193–197) R. A. Dixon Plant Biology Division, Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, 2510 Sam Noble Parkway, Ardmore, OK 73401, USA