$6M renewable fuels grant aims to maximize energy from sorghum
A $6 million renewable fuels grant for Clemson researchers will fund a three-year project that could not only help farmers, but could accelerate future research by funding new sensory robots and systems that speed up the testing process, according Stephen Kresovich, project lead and director of Clemson University’s Institute of Translational Genomics.
“We’re trying to replace slow, cumbersome techniques with high-efficiency measurements of the process,” said Kresovich, who said his team of researchers are partnering with The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, the Danforth Plant Science Center and Near Earth Autonomy. “What we’re really doing is trying to advance the science of genetics and engineering simultaneously.”
The project is titled “Breeding high yielding bioenergy sorghum for the new bioenergy belt,” and is focused on maximizing energy from sorghum, a hardy plant currently used largely as feedstock.
But research on this level can be slow, as samples need to be taken manually, transported to the lab, dried and ground before they can be tested.
That’s where robotics comes in, he said. The grant – one of six from the U.S. Department of Energy – will fund the design, development and engineering of both ground-based and aerial equipment studded with sensors that make measuring progress quicker and more precise. The new tools will also include machine learning platforms to help researchers comb through reams and reams of data to find gold nuggets of useful information, said Kresovich.
“In some instances it could be a Mars rover type of thing. In other instances it will be a flyover,” he said. “With the complexity of what we’re trying to do, it’s probably at the cutting edge, but science is steps in a process.”
With 30,000 genes in each unique sorghum plant, Kresovich said researchers are focused on discovering how those networks of genes affect photosynthesis, which can affect how fast or how energy-rich a plant becomes. The time-intensive nature of this kind of research has held sorghum exploration back, he said, to the point where only around 20 percent of the 40,000 different plant varieties have been explored.
“It’s like the bank is open and we can go through the drawers of the bank to see if we can find any gold nuggets,” he said.
Progress for the three-year project will depend on how fast useful genes are discovered and developed and how quickly sensory systems and robotics can be designed and engineered, Kresovich said. The testing sites for the sorghum will be in South Carolina, primarily near Clemson and tentatively near Florence.
The Department of Energy awarded a total of $30 million in grants via its ARPA-E agency. Other projects included $8 million to Donald Danforth Plan Science Center in Missouri, $3.3 million to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington, $6.5 million to Purdue University in Indiana, $3.1 million to Texas A&M AgriLife Research in Texas and $3.1 million to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Illinois.
