Improving Plant Cell Walls for Use as a Renewable Industrial Feedstock

Objective

With oil reserves diminishing and the effects of industrial emissions on global climate, there is a need for renewable carbon-neutral industrial feedstocks. First generation biorefineries, producing biofuels and bioplastics by the fermentation of sugar or starch, are seeing a rapid expansion and are adding stress to food supplies. A more sustainable option is to use plant biomass from agricultural by-products, or dedicated biomass crops. Plant biomass is underutilized, abundant and composed mostly of cell wall polysaccharides. Conversion of these polysaccharides to sugars will provide cheap and abundant raw materials for industrial biotechnology. The use of plant biomass in this way is hampered by the high cost of saccharification due to the recalcitrance of cell walls to enzymatic hydrolysis. RENEWALL aims to find ways to overcome this technical bottleneck by identifying and modifying the structural features of plant cell walls that make them difficult to process. Our partnership brings together outstanding biologists, chemists, and enzymologists, as well as industrialists from the plant breeding and biotechnology sectors, from Europe and the USA who can together take an integrated multidisciplinary approach to solving this fundamental problem. Combining genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and systems approaches, we will achieve a step-change in our understanding of the biosynthesis of the major components of plant biomass, namely; lignin, cellulose and matrix polysaccharides. Using state-of-the-art and novel analytical methods we will determine the basis of the recalcitrance of plant biomass to saccharification. Combining these approaches, we will identify new genes that can be manipulated to improve the ease and yield of biomass saccharification and will generate rational approaches for improving the quality of plant biomass as an industrial feedstock

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

• natural sciences biological sciences biochemistry biomolecules carbohydrates
• engineering and technology industrial biotechnology biomaterials bioplastics
• engineering and technology industrial biotechnology biomaterials biofuels
• agricultural sciences agricultural biotechnology biomass
• engineering and technology industrial biotechnology bioprocessing technologies fermentation

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

• Biorefineries
• biofuels
• biomass
• cell
• cellulose
• lignins
• matrix
• plant
• polysaccharides
• saccharification
• wall

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

• FP7-KBBE - Specific Programme "Cooperation": Food, Agriculture and Biotechnology

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

• KBBE-2007-3-1-02 - ENERGY PLANTS - Novel plants for energy production
• KBBE-2007-3-1-01 - PLANT CELL WALLS - Understanding Plant Cell Walls for optimizing Biomass potential

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

FP7-KBBE-2007-1
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

CP-IP - Large-scale integrating project

Coordinator

Participants (16)