Advances in Methods to Improve the Sugarcane Crop as “Energy Cane” for Biorefinery: An Appraisal

Abstract

Plant biomass is a source of renewable energy and biomolecules amenable to feed environmentally sustainable biorefineries. Chemistry, biotechnology, and process engineering advances will make biorefineries feasible in technical and cost aspects. Efforts have been concentrated in assessing plant biodiversity and crop potentialities for manipulation of physiological responses such as carbon fluxes toward soluble, storage, and structural sugars, waxes, oils, phenolics, and many other products. Thanks to advances in the “omics” field by the use of model plants, these issues have been addressed, allowing for a better comprehension of the general plant metabolism with concomitant inferences to important crops, like sugarcane. Plant cell walls are one of the most abundant, renewable, and useful biomaterial on the earth. However, wall polymers are entrapped in an imbricated structural organization. Thus, the viability of using such feedstock in a bio-based economy will greatly depend on the integration of “green” and “white” technologies in the production processes to efficiently extract and use molecules and energy stored in biomass. In this chapter, we discuss some principles underlying biorefination and bottlenecks under the crop physiology aspects—including Saccharum. Correlations between biomass yield and properties with environmental factors are revisited.