Resilience: Short in Sugar Cane but Plentiful in Energy Cane.

RESILIENCE: SHORT IN SUGAR CANE BUT PLENTIFUL IN ENERGY CANE

Sizuo Matsuoka, Vignis S.A., Brazil

ABSTRACT

RESILIENCE: SHORT IN SUGAR CANE BUT PLENTIFUL IN ENERGY CANE

Sizuo Matsuoka, Vignis S.A., Brazil

ABSTRACT

Humanity is facing a pressing need to decarbonize the atmosphere in order to avoid catastrophic consequences to the Planet. To this end, bioenergy is being considered one of a valuable contributor. Sugar cane holds great potential to move towards a sustainable bioenergy production, as it is one of the most efficient biomass producing plant. However, the stagnant world sugar cane yield is a menace to fulfillment of the prospected high demand for bioenergy. Although abound promises of reaching that goal with new productive cultivars there is a bottleneck not yet acknowledged: a dependable resilience of the cultivars. Resilience is a key factor in any agricultural crop and the genetic constitution of conventional sugar cane clearly shows why it fails in it. In a century-old sugar cane breeding system, one drive has prevailed: besides the cultivar having high concentration of sugar, they have to be of low fiber, alleged to the mills operate with high efficiency. To accomplish this tradeoff, the sugary ancestral Saccharum officinarum contributes with nearly 85% to the genome of the cultivars, while the fibrous and resilient ancestral S. spontaneum complements the rest. With this composition it is met the feedstock quality imposed by the industry but the level of resilience is prejudiced. As result, the productivity of sugar cane has levelled off worldwide and the only chance of a leap forward is to break this captive dogmatism with energy cane: a plant with higher contribution of the genome of S. spontaneum. With this gene influx the resultant plant has higher resilience, the higher the genome contribution of this ancestral, the higher its resilience. This new hybrid type with high fiber content can definitively upgrade the biomass agroindustry, due to both its higher resilience, besides heterosis for biomass productivity and other favorable characteristics, thus giving a valuable contribution to CO2 mitigation.

Key words: Saccharum officinarum; Saccharum spontaneum; bioenergy; renewable energyKey words: Saccharum officinarum; Saccharum spontaneum; bioenergy; renewable energy; C mitigation.