Team Researches Innovative Approach to Engineer Tobacco Plants
A joint project to turn tobacco into oil was recently featured in the New York Times.
Peggy Lemaux, Cooperative Extension Specialist, is on the research project with lead Principal Investigator Christer Jansson, a biochemist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Anastasios Melis is UC Berkeley’s lead PI on this project, along with Kris Niyogi in PMB, David Wemmer in the Department of Chemistry and Cheryl Kerfeld, an Adjunct Professor in PMB and a researcher at the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute.
Other members of the group are Ling Yuan and Orlando Chambers at the University of Kentucky. The goal of the group is to engineer tobacco plants with algal genes so that they use energy from sunlight to produce various biofuels directly in their leaves, which could then be harvested, crushed and the fuel extracted.
The article by Matthew L. Wald discusses how researchers are experimenting with tobacco to see if the plant can be turned into oil.
The goal is to engineer tobacco plants that use energy from sunlight to produce fuel molecules directly in their leaves. Once the fuel is extracted from the leaves, scientists estimate about 1,000 acres of tobacco could yield one million gallons of fuel.
Tobacco is used instead of other plants because it's cheap, widely grown, and it would not interfere with food production.
The idea was featured at an annual meeting of Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which funds "interesting" and innovative energy ideas that transforms the way we generate, store, and use energy. Out of the thousands of projects at the meeting, this tobacco project captured the attention of journalists because of its enticing concept.