A new book details how lignin once protected algae from UV radiation, then later in evolutionary time became a structural support for trees. The following is an excerpt from When the Earth Was Green: ...

For lignin-modified GM trees, this is clearly not the case; the huge variability that exists between different varieties of plant (including naturally occurring mutants) in both lignin and ...

When trees inhale carbon, some of it is used to build complex structural molecules like cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. Cellulose—durable, tightly packed strands of the simple sugar glucose ...

One of the problems besetting the production of fuels from biomass is that millions of years of evolution have made plants decidedly resistant to the idea. A plant does not particularly want to be ...

Although the components of wood – cellulose and lignin – are exceedingly cheap and plentiful, combining these into a wood-like structure is not straightforward, despite many attempts to make ...

Barrangou and his colleagues used a predictive machine learning model to identify genes in poplar trees (Populus trichocarpa) that they could modify to create ideal traits for fiber productions, ...