Following the success of the 1st Pan-American Congress on Plants and BioEnergy held in 2008, the plant bioenergy community will come together again for the 2nd Pan American Congress on Plants and BioEnergy to be held August 8-11, 2009 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. As with the 1st Congress, the goal of this meeting is to bring together governmental policy makers and science administrators along with plant biologists, agronomists, microbiologists, economists and ecologists to discuss issues related to bioenergy security. This year's meeting will focus entirely on bioenergy crops - the progress that is being made to introduce them into the agricultural landscape, the underlying biology of bioenergy plants, and new ideas to enhance biomass yield and quality for the energy crops of the future. The funding provided by NSF helps defray the costs of participation of students and young investigators from the U.S. scientific community.
The search for new sources of energy to substitute fossil fuels has guided several strategies to obtain efficient methods to produce bioenergy. Nowadays, Brazil and the USA are considered as world leaders in this area. This is based on the facts that both countries are keen to master technologies of production of ethanol from biomass.?Plants are primary sources of bioenergy as they are capable to perform photosynthesis and produce sugars that can be fermented to produce ethanol. At the same time, lipids produced in seeds and algae can be converted into biodiesel. In some cases, new plant species have been chosen and they will have to be studied in several ways so that they can become a crop in the future. Others, such as maize and sugarcane, are well established and crops currently in use. Although it appears that such crops are well studied, there is still much to do in terms of research. For example, it is estimated that approximately 70% of the costs of production of sugarcane are related to the way the crops are managed and this is directly related to the knowledge about its physiology, biochemistry and genetics. Thus, it is expected that basic and applied sciences in these areas can considerably improve productivity. The First Pan-American Congress on Plants and Bioenergy took place in Mérida, México in 2008. Today, scientists are working towards better ways to produce biodiesel. Others focus on understanding and tailoring biomass for a 3rd generation of biofuels, i.e. transforming biomass directly into fuel using chemical technologies. Companies all over the world have started their own research programs and/or started collaboration with University research laboratories, all working to produce secure and sustainable bioenergy while mitigating human impacts on the global climate change. After the first meeting in Mérida, the organizing committee with support of the American Society of Plant Biologists, established the Pan-American Congress of Plants and Bioenergy as a recurring biennial meeting. Through the support of the National Science Foundation’s Plant Genome Research Program, support for registration was made for about 10 students, post-doctorals, and pre-tenured faculty to attend the 2nd Pan-American Congress on Plants and Bioenergy was held in August, 2010, in São Pedro, Brazil, a small village in the heart of the largest sugarcane producer in the world. Residual funds were directed to provide free registration of 50 such individuals at a satellite meeting, the US-Brazil Symposium on Sustainable energy, in May, 2011, in West Lafayette, Indiana. Species like maize, sugarcane, Miscanthus, and switchgrass, as well as algae, were put into perspective regarding the recent advances related to them as sources of bioethanol and biodiesel. The idea was to examine the advances obtained up to that point and discuss the genetic improvement future of each crop.?The development of plant biotechnology downstream of genetic understanding was the central theme of congress, which had the practical idea to connect the potential of each country in order to consolidate the position of the Americas as world leaders in bioenergy research.??Topic areas include the genetics and genomics of biomass crops, the biology and genetics of sustainability, landscape sustainability in bioenergy cropping systems, feedstock logistics, and tailoring biomass for biochemical and thermochemical conversion. The organizers were pleased that the field of bioenergy has attracted women and underrepresented minorities, which is reflected in the participation as keynote lecturers and plenary speakers (see www.plantsandbioenergy.com.br/lecture.php) and www.eas.purdue.edu/news/newsletter/6th_Frontiers_in_Bioenergy.pdf)
