Abstract
BackgroundMiscanthus sinensis is a high yielding perennial grass species with great potential as a bioenergy feedstock. One of the challenges that currently impedes commercial cellulosic biofuel production is the technical difficulty to efficiently convert lignocellulosic biomass into biofuel. The development of feedstocks with better biomass quality will improve conversion efficiency and the sustainability of the value-chain. Progress in the genetic improvement of biomass quality may be substantially expedited by the development of genetic markers associated to quality traits, which can be used in a marker-assisted selection program.ResultsTo this end, a mapping population was developed by crossing two parents of contrasting cell wall composition. The performance of 182 F1 offspring individuals along with the parents was evaluated in a field trial with a randomized block design with three replicates. Plants were phenotyped for cell wall composition and conversion efficiency characters in the second and third growth season after establishment. A new SNP-based genetic map for M. sinensis was built using a genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) approach, which resulted in 464 short-sequence uniparental markers that formed 16 linkage groups in the male map and 17 linkage groups in the female map. A total of 86 QTLs for a variety of biomass quality characteristics were identified, 20 of which were detected in both growth seasons. Twenty QTLs were directly associated to different conversion efficiency characters. Marker sequences were aligned to the sorghum reference genome to facilitate cross-species comparisons. Analyses revealed that for some traits previously identified QTLs in sorghum occurred in homologous regions on the same chromosome.ConclusionIn this work we report for the first time the genetic mapping of cell wall composition and bioconversion traits in the bioenergy crop miscanthus. These results are a first step towards the development of marker-assisted selection programs in miscanthus to improve biomass quality and facilitate its use as feedstock for biofuel production.
Highlights
Miscanthus sinensis is a high yielding perennial grass species with great potential as a bioenergy feedstock
M. × giganteus is the only species of the genus Miscanthus that is commercially exploited for biomass production [6, 7]
Variation in lignin content is of particular interest for improving biomass quality of miscanthus, and variation in both Acid detergent lignin (ADL) and Klason lignin (KL) was extensive
Summary
Miscanthus sinensis is a high yielding perennial grass species with great potential as a bioenergy feedstock. Miscanthus is a perennial C4 grass capable of producing high biomass yields in temperate climates [1] It is a crop characterized by high resource-use efficiency owing to its early spring emergence and long vegetative phase, as well as its rhizomatous growing habit, which allows the recycling of nutrients between growing seasons [2,3,4]. These characteristics make miscanthus an interesting lignocellulose feedstock for the production of cellulosic biofuels [5]. Great and largely untapped genetic diversity is harboured within and among natural populations of M. sacchariflorus and M. sinensis, which have adapted to a wide range of geographical conditions [6, 13]
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