Sustainable co-production of plant lipids and cellulosic sugars from transgenic energycane at an industrially relevant scale: A proof of concept for alternative feedstocks

Development of sustainable and scalable technologies to convert lignocellulosic biomass to biofuels is critical to achieve carbon neutrality. The potential of transgenic bioenergy crops as a renewable source of sugars and lipids has been demonstrated at bench-scale. However, scaling up these processes is critical for holistic analysis. Here proof-of-concept for chemical-free hydrothermal pretreatment of transgenic energycane-oilcane line L13 at an industrially relevant scale to recover vegetative lipids along with cellulosic sugars is presented. Pilot-scale pretreatment of 97 kg of transgenic energycane-oilcane L13 bagasse enhanced the recovery of cellulosic glucose and xylose by 5-fold as compared to untreated bagasse. High solids hydrothermal bioprocessing helped in the enrichment of vegetative lipids in the biomass residues and allowed its recovery at the end of the bioprocess. Palmitic and oleic acids were the predominant fatty acids (FAs) extracted from stems and leaves. The processing did not affect lipid composition. The efficiency of lipid recovery from untreated biomass was 75.9% which improved to 88.7% upon pretreatment. The vegetative tissues of transgenic energycane-oilcane L13 contained 0.42 metric ton per hectare of lipids. Processing vegetative tissues yielded 0.38 metric tons/ha of lipids. This approaches an oil yield similar to soybean (global average 0.44 metric ton/ha) and is almost twice as high as the oil yield from sugarcane engineered to hyperaccumulate lipids (0.20 metric ton/ha). The study suggests that further optimization by state-of-the-art metabolic engineering and biomass processing can establish transgenic bioenergy crops for commercial drop-in fuel production.