and developers to overcome challenges like scalability. Some can take a wide range of feedstocks on any given day, others are more restrictive, and balance is needed of all the agriculture concerns upstream with downstream technology provider requirements on their technology, says Sam Jackson, vice president of business development with Genera Energy.Ceres Inc. also works to improve commercial development with product lines and development programs for high biomass sorghum, sweet sorghum, switchgrass and miscanthus. We have collaborated with a number of industry participants involved in cellulosic biofuels and biopower production, says Gary Koppenjan, communications director with Ceres. These tests have confirmed that biomass from our energy grasses can be converted and processed into various fuels or biobased products, and have provided data we have used to further enhance our energy crops for use with these conversion technologies.Sorghums Scalability John Mullet, a professor at Texas A&M University, College Station, received $1.23 million for a project focused on improving two main categories of traits that affect the yield of high biomass energy sorghum: water use efficiency and drought resiliency. You need a combination of those two traits in order to build an ideal energy crop for the U.S., Mullet says. Water in a nonirrigated system is the primary limitation determining yield. Thats why this project focuses on improving the plants ability to use water to make biomass.Ceres has begun commercial development of sorghum. There are well-established agronomic systems for sorghum, its high-yielding, grows quickly and fits well in with crop rotations, so it has received the most commercial interest to date, Koppenjan says. We have focused our efforts in Brazil where there is existing infrastructure and significant opportunities today for new energy crops to complement first generation feedstocks and increase bioenergy production.Mullet says currently most of the sorghum being used for ethanol production in the U.S. is grain sorghum, but research estimates energy sorghum can produce twice as much biomass and biofuels when optimized. We think it is a very promising commercial product, longer term, Mullet says.Another project selected to improve sorghum yield received $1.34 million. Patrick Brown, a quantitative geneticist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is working with a biochemist to characterize novel genetic variants that affect lignocellulosic composition and saccharification yield in bioenergy sorghum and closely related perennial grasses. We are going to look at sorghum lines, and we are going to evaluate them for their agronomic performance, Brown says. Ultimately, what is really of interest is the economic yield per acre of different lines.Modified MiscanthusThe perennial miscanthus is being studied by Erik Sacks, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, quantifying phenotypic and genetic diversity of miscanthus sacchariflorus. His project is receiving $1.5 million, and the goal is to develop molecular markers associated with traits of that can enable plant breeders to quickly develop improved biomass cultivars of miscanthus giganteus and closely related sugarcanes and energy canes.Right now large-scale production is not commercially feasible for miscanthus because establishment costs are much higher than other energy crops, according to Koppenjan. In miscanthus, we are developing seed-propagated varieties that have the same high-yielding