Robert Lloyd - a Sir Gar Blog of random news . . . and some Clecs!

The development of a promising biofuel crop, Miscanthus, has been given a boost today with the announcement of an additional £6.4 M in UK Government funding, over five years, for an integrated and collaborative breeding programme.  The breeding programme aims to produce new commercial varieties of optimised Miscanthus to make a significant contribution to future energy security. The development of crops as sources of bioenergy is an important component in finding economically acceptable substitutes for fossil fuels. Miscanthus, a ubiquitous Asian grass with high yields and requiring low inputs, is a particularly promising plant species for bioenergy development. The new collaborative breeding programme will further link previous research on Miscanthus at IBERS (funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in 2004-2010 and by Ceres, Inc., an integrated energy crop seed company (from 2007 onwards), to a suite of co-ordinated research projects funded b...

Researchers at Aberystwyth University and in the United States have collaborated to complete the first high-resolution, comprehensive genetic map of a promising energy crop called miscanthus. The results – published in the current edition of the peer-reviewed, online journal PLoS One – provide a significant breakthrough towards advancing the production of bioenergy. The breakthrough results from the long-term collaboration between energy crop company Ceres, Inc., based in Thousand Oaks, California, USA, and the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences (IBERS) at Aberystwyth. The IBERS team created the collection of genetically related plants and Ceres then sequenced and analyzed the DNA. In other crops, this type of comprehensive genetic mapping has significantly shortened product development timelines. As published in the journal article, Ceres researchers mapped all 19 chromosomes of miscanthus, a towering cane-like grass that can be used as a feedstock for ad...