An enzyme found in sugar cane roots raised sugar release from bagasse by up to six times when added to a commercial enzyme cocktail. The sugars released are later used to make second-generation ethanol.
The work comes from the Plant Ecological Physiology Laboratory at USP’s Institute of Biosciences, coordinated by Marcos Silveira Buckeridge, and appeared in the Journal of Experimental Botany. Current commercial cocktails come mostly from fungi, and this is the first plant-derived molecule with this effect.
The team studied more than 32,000 active genes in the roots and hopes to develop a customised, fully plant-based cocktail. The research took 17 years.
