SBIR-STTR Award

As the world's population reaches 9.7 billion in the year 2050 global crop production will need to double to meet the projected demands for food feed fiber and fuel. Corn the most produced annual crop in the world will have a major role in helping to meet this need. In the United States more than a third of the corn produced is used as feed for livestocks (148 million tons in 2017) and its stover also represents the most abundant agricultural residue for production of clean bioenergy (100 million tons by 2020).Improving the quantity and quality of corn biomass and stress tolerance are essential to sustain global productions of meat and milk as well as biofuels and bio-products. Especially biomass quality for the above agricultural and industrial processes is determined by its digestibility or process ability a trait associated with biomass composition which consists of energy-rich matrix polysaccharides protected by recalcitrant indigestible lignin polymers. This SBIR Phase I project will develop a more efficient approach to engineering corn biomass digestibility while improving yields and maintaining resilience to stress. Although traditional breeding has increased corn yields drastically over the past 50 years modest or no improvements have been achieved for forage quality and digestibility. This is in part due to partial antagonisms between these two traits. This work proposes to fine-tune lignin deposition in corn biomass and thereby reducing lignin content by 20% in a tissue-specific manner as well as increasing biomass yields by at least 10%. The quality trait provided by our patent-pending genetic engineering strategy will ameliorate biomass degradability. Our molecular metabolic and phenotypic characterizations of these new lines in Phase I will represent valuable material for both future field-test validation and introgression of the biomass quality trait into elite germplasms via modern breeding programs.