ABSTRACT
Tropical grasses are among the most efficient biomass accumulators known, thanks to “C4” photosynthesis, a complex combination of biochemical and morphological specializations discovered in sugarcane (Kortschak et al. 1965; Hatch and Slack 1966) that confer efficient carbon assimilation at high temperatures. The Saccharinae clade of tropical grasses is of singularlylarge importance, including three leading candidate lignocellulosic biofuels crops, Sorghum (currently the #2 US biofuel crop), Saccharum (sugarcane and its relatives, currently the #1 biofuel crop worldwide), and Miscanthus, among the highest-yielding biomass crops with about twice the biomass of switchgrass in the Midwest in the US (Heaton et al. 2004).
