Until today, research to understand how to change woody biomass to improve its efficiency of conversion to simpler components has mostly targeted the complex polymers already present in wood.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge have taken a different approach. They took callose, a polymer that is naturally occurring in some cell walls of plants, and successfully engineered it into the specialised secondary cell walls of plants – the wood. Published in Nature Plants, the research involving international collaborations across multiple institutes shows callose-enriched wood is much more easily converted into simple sugars and bioethanol than non-engineered wood.
