By Xinhua
Beijing : China and Singapore Tuesday agreed to launch a joint research on energy-intensive plant hybrids for generating biofuels.
China’s Institute of Botany and Singapore’s Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL) signed a pact in this regard and will set up here a new laboratory that will focus on genetically modified sweet sorghum and yam.
Prof Zhong Kang, deputy director of the institute who will head the lab, said that sweet sorghum would be an ideal fuel source.
By using bio-engineering technologies, the energy content in the plants can be improved, he said.
“It is true that energy can be obtained from many biomass sources, but sweet sorghum, according to our latest research, is among the best from which people could extract juice to make ethanol,” Zhong said.
Sweet sorghum, cane-like plant with high sugar content, are widely cultivated in northern China.
The trend is to derive biomass energy from cellulosic sources instead of sugar sources.
Zhong said the facility would conduct interdisciplinary studies on photosynthesis, biochemistry, molecular biology and ecophysiology.
The institute is China’s leading organization for plant research, while the five-year-old TLL has conducted cutting-edge research in molecular biology and genetics utilizing a broad range of model organisms.