Andy Pereira
University of Arkansas, USA
Title: Regulation of the lignocellulose pathway in rice as a model for grasses
Biography
Biography: Andy Pereira
Abstract
In the quest for alternative energy sources, biomass feedstocks play an important role. Crop wastes are oft en overlooked because of the complexities involved in adapting crops for industrial scale utilization in biofuels. Nevertheless, cellulose from plant biomass is the largest renewable energy resource of carbon fixed from the atmosphere, which can be converted into fermentable sugars for production into ethanol. Rice straw especially is a major crop waste that is oft en burnt or removed from fi elds. However, the cellulose present as lignocellulosic biomass is embedded in a hemicellulose and lignin matrix from which it needs to be extracted for effi cient processing. In our research we found that overexpression of the Arabidopsis transcription factor SHINE (AtSHN) in rice altered lignocellulose composition, increasing cellulose by 34% and reducing lignin by as much as 45% with no compromise in plant strength and agronomic performance, supporting its use as a regulatory switch for altering lignocellulose composition in grasses. Th e AtSHN regulatory pathway was characterized by ChIP-Seq and ChIP-qPCR with AtSHN affi nity tagged lines, and AtSHN targets confi rmed by transactivation assays of promoter targets in rice protoplasts. Knockdown lines of the rice OsSHN gene were characterized phenotypically and the downstream pathway analyzed by RNASeq analysis. Integration of the information from AtSHN and OsSHN functional studies in rice, provide a framework model of the role of the SHN gene family in regulating biochemical and physiological pathways in rice and underpin its potential utility in understanding regulation of the lignocellulosic pathway in grasses.
