The Future, Unzipped

by Erik Ness (Grow) Lignin is a tough organic compound that gives plants like this poplar their structure—and it’s one of the biggest obstacles in breaking down plants to produce biofuel. John Ralph and his team have created a new technology that makes it easier to break down (or “unzip”) the lignin in cell walls to release the cellulose within. Biochemist John Ralph and his colleagues have pioneered a technology that could revolutionize how industry produces biofuels and other value-added goods.

A kind of a natural plastic or binder, lignin gets in the way of some industrial processes, and Ralph’s team had cracked a complicated puzzle of genetics and chemistry to address the problem. They call it zip-lignin, because the modified lignin comes apart—roughly—like a zipper.

Carbohydrate polymers—primarily cellulose and hemicelluloses—and a small amount of protein make up a sort of scaffolding for the construction of plant cell walls. And lignin is the glue, surrounding and encasing this fibrous matrix with a durable and water-resistant polymer—almost like plastic. Some liken lignin to the resin in fiberglass.

Enzymes, proteins that catalyze reactions, orchestrate the assembly of complex cell wall carbohydrates from building blocks like xylose and glucose. The types of enzymes present in cells therefore determine the composition of the wall.

Lignin is more enigmatic, says Ralph. Although its parts (called monomers) are assembled using enzymes, the polymerization of these parts into lignin does not require enzymes but instead relies on just the chemistry of the monomers and their radical coupling reactions. “It’s combinatorial, and so you make a polymer in which no two molecules are the same, perhaps anywhere in the whole plant,” says Ralph.

This flexible construction is at the heart of lignin’s toughness, but it’s also a major obstacle for the production of paper and biofuels. Both industries need the high-value carbohydrates, especially the cellulose fraction. And both have to peel away the lignin to get to the treasure inside.

Though lignin created a snowflake universe of different molecules, there were rules of assembly. A complex chemical pathway enabled lignin construction, with a mechanism that remained constant across different families of plants, but with many potential building blocks.

Ralph and his colleagues were the first to detail what was happening to lignin as the controlling genes of the biosynthetic pathway were turned on and off, a task ably completed by a slew of outstanding collaborators worldwide with expertise in biotechnological methods—but who lacked the diagnostic structural tools to determine what the plant was doing in response.

Ralph’s team quickly learned that lignification was somewhat flexible. “We figured that we could engineer lignin well beyond the previously held bounds,” says Ralph. As various pathways and chemical possibilities danced in their heads, it struck them: What if, during lignification, they could persuade the plant to slip in a few monomers that had easily broken chemical bonds? If they did it right, lignin would retain its structural value to the plant, but be easier to deal with chemically.

They dropped into stealth mode and began to work on it. They finished important research and stuck it in drawers—signature research, the kind that, when finally published, would capture journal covers. And yet they sat on it, quietly chipping away for nearly a decade.

It helped that there was a flurry of controversy in the field—what Chemical & Engineering News called “the lignin war.” “Part of the reason we could sit on it was that, at the time, making these kinds of molecules was so far-fetched,” says Grabber. “Probably if we had talked about it, people would have laughed at us.” READ MORE