VIB (P12)

Wout Boerjan, Department of Plant Systems Biology, VIB and Department of Plant Biotechnology and Genetics,
Ghent University (P12)

P12 is leader of WP4 entitled ‘Understanding and making value of lignin’. In WP4, P12 will mine transcriptomic data from maize and Arabidopsis for lignin biosynthesis genes to make gene silencing or overexpression constructs for maize and Miscanthus transformation to improve biomass for saccharification potential. In addition, P12 will reveal novel aromatic pathways and obtain insight into altered fluxes through these pathways, by profiling the aromatic metabolome of a set of maize mutants with altered lignification and by integrating the data with transcript profiling data. Furthermore, in WP5, P12 will identify the molecular structure of lignin breakdown products upon various pre-treatments of monocot biomass.

Using mass-spectrometry, the sequence of small lignin polymers can be determined (Morreel et al., Mass-spectrometry-based sequencing of lignin oliomers. Plant Physiology, 1464–1478, 2010)