Hybrid Systems for Gene Confinement and Breeding of Perennial Plants Used for Biofuels

The utilization of dedicated bioenergy crops from renewable biomass resources is a goal with great relevance to current environmental and security issues on a global scale. There are significant ecological, economic and political pressures to develop liquid biofuels production (such as biodiesel, green gasoline, biobutanol, and biodiesel aviation) and utilization, to offset petroleum-based gasoline and diesel fuel use, especially in the transportation sector. One reasonable source of biomass that would be useful for biofuels production is the production of feedstocks from perennial plants. The need for the US to increase its efforts on production of renewable biofuels and the role that switchgrass as a bioenergy crop will play are well understood and widely known. To fully realize the potential of biofuels, the power of advanced genetic and biotechnology tools need to be brought to bear on the improvement of bioenergy crops. The opportunity addressed by this project concerns the improvement of crops useful for bioenergy. Rapid genetic improvement of the most promising perennial feedstocks, such as switchgrass and related species, which are not highly domesticated, are anticipated by current transgenic, genomics, bioinformatics, association genetics, marker assisted breeding, conventional genetics and other advanced breeding approaches. The use of advanced genetic tools for the improvement of plant feedstocks for bioenergy will be required to realize the full economic and environmental benefits of cellulosic liquid biofuels particularly from perennial plants. The problem addressed here is that given current regulatory concerns, new traits might never be deregulated for commercial release without a robust gene confinement strategy. Bioconfinement of transgenes is thus an obvious regulatory, economic, environmental and biosafety objective to the release and commercialization of transgenic bioenergy feedstocks and its development is the opportunity addressed in this proposal. The work focuses on the problem of creating pollen and seed sterility required to make new hybrids and for gene confinement applications. The anticipated results are directed toward commercial application. The intention of Plant Advancements is that this sterility operating platform (and its IP) will be useful for release of genetically improved perennial plants used for biofuels. Transgenic trait genes developed by other companies will benefit from this platform for commercial release, and the platform varieties and lines will enter the marketplace.