It is now well recognized that burning fossil fuels and deforestation are major contributors to climate change, and that plant biomass can serve as an alternative renewable and carbon-neutral raw material for the production of bio-energy. Although first-generation bio-energy crops currently provide most of the bio-ethanol and biodiesel, it is expected that lignocellulosic biomass crops with improved yield and optimized cell wall composition will become the second generation biofuel crops. Fast-growing perennial grasses, such as Miscanthus, and trees, such as poplar and willow, have large potential to become the major energy crops for the future.

Bio-ethanol is made by fermentation of sugars that are released from lignocellulosic biomass by cocktails of cellulolytic enzymes. In this process, lignin is the main limiting factor because it limits the accessibility of the cellulose microfibrils to enzymatic depolymerisation. Therefore, lignocellulosic plant biomass needs to be pretreated by chemicals or steam explosion to break-down lignin, making saccharification a costly process. However, there is enormous potential to engineer plant cell walls by exploiting the available genetic resources and by genetic modification. This potential has remained largely unexplored.

The major goal of the Bio-energy group is to understand the biosynthesis, polymerization and structure of lignin to provide the fundamental knowledge that is necessary to design plant cell walls that are easier to convert to bio-ethanol.