• After palm oil was brought to South East Asia from central Africa in the 20 century the worldwide production has grown by 65 percent over the past decade. Demand is still increasing, especially after the European Union agreed to its 10 percent target for biofuels in their total transport consumption. • As biggest and second biggest producer of palm oil Indonesia and Malaysia account together ...

Jatropha is an important second-generation biofuel plant. Salinity is a major factor adversely impacting the growth and yield of several plants including Jatropha. SbNHX1 is a vacuolar Na⁺/H⁺ antiporter gene that compartmentalises excess Na⁺ ions into the vacuole and maintains ion homeostasis. We have previously cloned and characterised the SbNHX1 gene from an extreme halophyte, Salicornia brac...

All energy scenarios show a shift toward an increased percentage of renewable energy sources, including biomass. This study gives an overview of water footprints (WFs) of bioenergy from 12 crops that currently contribute the most to global agricultural production: barley, cassava, maize, potato, rapeseed, rice, rye, sorghum, soybean, sugar beet, sugar cane, and wheat. In addition, this study in...

BACKGROUND Ever increasing demand for fossil fuels is a major factor for rapid depletion of these non-renewable energy resources, which has enhanced the interest of finding out alternative sources of energy. In recent years jatropha seed oil has been used extensively for production of bio-diesel and has shown significant potential to replace petroleum fuels at least partially. De-oiled jatropha...

BACKGROUND Higher seed yield is one of the objectives of jatropha breeding. However, genetic analysis of the yield traits has not been done in jatropha. Quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping was conducted to identify genetic factors controlling growth and seed yield in jatropha, a promising biofuel crop. RESULTS A linkage map was constructed consisting of 105 SSR (simple sequence repeat) mark...

Jatropha (Jatropha curcas L.) is an economically important species with a great potential for biodiesel production. To enrich the jatropha genomic databases and resources for microgravity studies, we sequenced and annotated the transcriptome of jatropha and developed SSR and SNP markers from the transcriptome sequences. In total 1,714,433 raw reads with an average length of 441.2 nucleotides we...