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ARS Home » Midwest Area » Urbana, Illinois » Global Change and Photosynthesis Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #312002
Title: Photosynthetic terpene hydrocarbon production for fuels and chemicals

Author
item WANG, XIN - Texas A&M University
item Ort, Donald
item YUAN, JOSHUA - Texas A&M University

Submitted to: Plant Biotechnology Journal
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 12/1/2014
Publication Date: 2/1/2015
Citation: Wang, X., Ort, D.R., Yuan, J. 2015. Photosynthetic terpene hydrocarbon production for fuels and chemicals. Plant Biotechnology Journal. 13(2):137-146.

Interpretive Summary: Central to biological renewable energy production is the efficient harnessing of sunlight energy to transform inorganic carbon into energy dense fuels and chemicals. Strategically, several major routes exist for generating renewable liquid fuel from sunlight, water and CO2. The first and second routes are the well-studied corn or sugarcane to bioethanol process, and the classic biodiesel route. The third route is the lignocellulosic biofuel platform. With emergent groundbreaking advances in genomics and synthetic biology, the opportunity to develop economic and sustainable biofuel platforms for infrastructure-compatible fuel with high energy density is now both real and unprecedented, even if as yet unachieved. It is shown that in planta photosynthetic hydrocarbon production represents a viable alternative for hydrocarbon biofuel production, and could lead to a sustainable platform in that reduced carbon and energy molecules would be provided directly from photosynthesis.

Technical Abstract: Photosynthetic terpene production[ED1] represents an energy and carbon-efficient route for hydrocarbon fuel production. Diverse terpene structures also provide the potential to produce next-generation 'drop-in' hydrocarbon fuel molecules. However, it is highly challenging to achieve efficient redirection of photosynthetic carbon and reductant into terpene biosynthesis. In this review, we discussed four major scientific and technical barriers for photosynthetic terpene production and recent advances to address these constraints. Collectively, photosynthetic terpene production needs to be optimized in a systematic fashion, in which proper repartitioning of photosynthetic output, optimization of terpene biosynthesis pathway, improvement of key enzymes, and the enhancement of sink effect through terpene storage or secretion are all important. New advances in synthetic biology offer a suite of potential opportunities to design and engineer photosynthetic terpene production.