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Summary Building sustainable platforms to produce biofuels and specialty chemicals has become an increasingly important strategy to supplement and replace fossil fuels and petrochemical‐derived products. Terpenoids are the most diverse class of natural products that have many commercial roles as specialty chemicals. Poplar is a fast growing, biomassdense bioenergy crop with many species known to produce large amounts of the hemiterpene isoprene, suggesting an inherent capacity to produce significant quantities of other terpenes. Here we aimed to engineer poplar with optimized pathways to produce squalene, a triterpene commonly used in cosmetic oils, a potential biofuel candidate, and the precursor to the further diversified classes of triterpenoids and sterols. The squalene production pathways were either re‐targeted from the cytosol to plastids or co‐produced with lipid droplets in the cytosol. Squalene and lipid droplet co‐production appeared to be toxic, which we hypothesize to be due to disruption of adventitious root formation, suggesting a need for tissue specific production. Plastidial squalene production enabled up to 0.63 mg/g fresh weight in leaf tissue, which also resulted in reductions in isoprene emission and photosynthesis. These results were also studied through a technoeconomic analysis, providing further insight into developing poplar as a production host.
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This content will become publicly available on October 1, 2026
Effects of chemical composition and physicochemical properties of poplar biomass on the performance of 3D printed poplar-reinforced PLA materials
The correlations between woody biomass properties and the mechanical and thermal performances of the 3D-printed poplar-plastic composites were investigated.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2435227
- PAR ID:
- 10652194
- Publisher / Repository:
- Royal Society of Chemistry
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- RSC Sustainability
- Volume:
- 3
- Issue:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 2753-8125
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 4478 to 4491
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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