Biofuels and Sustainability.

Energy security and climate change have cascading effects on the world's burgeoning population in terms of food security, environment, and sustainability. Due to depletion of fossil fuels and undesirable changes of climatic conditions, increase in air and water pollution, mankind started exploring alternate and sustainable means of meeting growing energy needs. One of the options is to use renewable sources of fuel-biofuel. In this chapter the authors have reviewed and presented sustainability impact on production of biofuels. Authors further reviewed state-of-the-art gene editing technologies toward improvement of biofuel crops. The authors recommend a phased transition from first-generation biofuel, and an acceleration toward use of technology to drive adoption of second-generation biofuels. Key aspects of technology and application of resource management models will enable these crops to bridge the global energy demand before we can completely transition to a more sustainable biofuel economy.

Generation of an expressed sequence tag (EST) library from salt-stressed roots of Jatropha curcas for identification of abiotic stress-responsive genes.

Improving salinity and drought tolerance of crop plants has been an important aim of modern agricultural development, which depends on understanding the functions of genes expressed during the process of stress adaptation. EST resources are an efficient and cost-effective solution to gene discovery. Jatropha curcas is emerging as the most promising tree oil seed as a source of biodiesel. To identify genes that respond to abiotic stress, in the present study, we report 1240 ESTs generated from root cDNA libraries of J. curcas. ESTs were clustered and assembled into a collection of 865 unigenes, with 107 contigs and 758 singleton sequences. The putative functions of several ESTs could be assigned by similarity to plant gene sequence comparisons. It was found that 23 full-length CDS (34%) and the majority of transcription factors had sequence similarity to genes known to be involved in abiotic and biotic stress tolerance. The expression pattern of nine selected genes revealed that these genes are differentially expressed in various tissues during adaptation to stress. The data could serve as a critical resource to enable plant improvement programmes towards enhancing the adaptability of J. curcas to growth on marginal lands.