Study show what makes plant cell walls compress and stretch

New findings about the building blocks of plant fibers open the door to advances in material engineering as well as food and agriculture, a Swedish-Australian research collaboration reported. The findings, published today ...

Discovery opens doors to building better plants

(Phys.org) —The survival of the vast majority of plants, including those that people rely on for food, depends on their ability to build strong but flexible cell walls. A key component of these walls is a polysaccharide ...

Swords to plowshares: Engineering plants for more biofuel sugars

(Phys.org) —Xylan is a polysaccharide composed of pentoses – five carbon sugars – that represents a double-edged sword for advanced biofuels. On the one hand, as the world's second most abundant source of biomass after ...

Garbage bug may help lower the cost of biofuel

One reason that biofuels are expensive to make is that the organisms used to ferment the biomass cannot make effective use of hemicellulose, the next most abundant cell wall component after cellulose. They convert only the ...

Molecular switch for cheaper biofuel

Biofuel is often obtained from starchy plants - but this places fuel production in competition with food production. At the Vienna University of Technology, genetically modified mold fungi are created, which have the ability ...

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