BioEnergy Science Center

The BioEnergy Science Center (BESC) will make transformative advances in understanding and overcoming the recalcitrance of biomassto deconstruction into sugars thereby enabling the displacement of imported petroleum with bioethanol, and other carbon neutral andsustainable biofuels. By combining engineered plant cell walls to reduce recalcitrance with new biocatalysts to improvedeconstruction, BESC will revolutionize within five years how biomass will be processed. BESC will apply a systems biology approachand new high-throughput (HTP) pipelines to achieve: 1) Targeted modification of plant cell walls to reduce their recalcitrance,thereby decreasing or even eliminating the need for costly chemical pretreatment; and the 2) Use of a single microorganism ormicrobial consortium to overcome biomass recalcitrance through single step conversion of biomass to biofuels (consolidatedbioprocessing).BESC has assembled a core team of top-tier universities, leading national laboratories, and industrial partners.ORNL will manage and house the BESC home base at the University of Tennessee/ORNL Joint Institute for Biological Sciences (JIBS)building funded by the State of Tennessee. The anchor facilities, expertise, and most of the equipment necessary to execute theproposed Center research are in place and the research program will be fully launched well within the first year.This FWPcontains the initial allotment of FY07 funds for this project. Subsequent funding is under the same FWP but a separate B&Rnumber.