Abstract
Applications of plant biotechnology play increasingly important role in solving food and energy crisis. As the world’s largest country by population, China pays special attention to the development of agricultural biotechnology and biomass energy technology. Several excellent review articles have introduced the research progress of China’s crop biotech and bioenergy. However, plant biotechnology in China has more diverse applications for non-food uses and environmental sustainability. This paper reviews the recent applications of plant biotechnology in bioenergy, biocontrol, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), and phytoremediation of polluted environments. The emphasis is mainly focused on the bioconversion of biofuels especially bioethanol and the activated carbon, the survey of energy plants rich in hydrocarbons and carbohydrates, the biocontrol agents (plant epiphytic yeasts) and phytoremediation of heavy metal pollution and water eutrophication. Moreover, plant biotechnology shows very good efficacy in the identifications of confused medicinal plants, active constituents of TCM and the taxonomic identification of plant diseases and insects. The huge number of biomass residue and abundant plant resources provide vast application perspectives for China’s plant biotechnology. Key words: Biomass energy, biocontrol agents, environmental pollution, phytoremediation, plant biotechnology, traditional Chinese medicine.
Highlights
The prominent problems facing the world today involve frequent natural disasters, food shortage, excessive use of resources, environmental pollution, etc., which severely restrict sustainable development of human society
This paper reviews the recent applications of plant biotechnology in bioenergy, biocontrol, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), and phytoremediation of polluted environments
Agricultural biotechnology is a core field of plant biotechnology researches
Summary
The prominent problems facing the world today involve frequent natural disasters, food shortage, excessive use of resources, environmental pollution, etc., which severely restrict sustainable development of human society. Significant progresses are achieved in energy plant survey (Fu and Huang, 2006; Ma et al, 2007; Wu et al, 2010), bioconversion of biomass resources to biofuels (Qu, 2007; Wu et al, 2010; Guo, 2009; Zhang and Zhao, 2010; Ding et al, 2010), bioenergy potential assessment (Yu and Tao, 2009; Tao et al, 2011; Zhou et al, 2011), etc. Recent review articles systematically reported the research progress of China’s plant biotechnology Whereas, most of these papers mainly focused on the application of plant biotechnology for food use (Huang et al, 2002; Xu et al, 2007; Karplus and Deng, 2008), beyond that, several excellent articles reviewed the application status of bioenergy (Wu et al, 2010), bioethanol development (Tao et al, 2011) and biomass energy assessment (Zhou et al, 2011). Special attentions are paid to the applications in bioenergy plants, traditional Chinese medicine, biocontrol of plant disease and pest and phytoremediation of soil and water pollution
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