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The prospect of sweet sorghum as the source for high biomass crop

Sanyuan Tang, Zi Wang, Chengxuan Chen, Peng Xie, Qi Xie

To reduce the world’s reliance on traditional fossil fuels, alternative fuel sources are being developed. The most common renewable fuel today is ethanol. Sweet sorghum has been developed as a potential source for bioethanol production. Comparing to other energy plants, sweet sorghum provides high biomass yield, high sugar/ethanol yield, and ability to grow on marginal land areas. The economic cost of growing and harvesting sweet sorghum for its fermentable carbohydrate is also analysed and found favourable compared to that of maize. Future studies on genetics will be focusing on reducing lignin content and improving biomass productivity of sweet sorghum.