Biography

John Mullet is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics and holder of the Adkisson Chair in Agricultural Biology.  He obtained his BS in Biology at Colgate University where he studied the life cycles of snow algae that live in the mountains of New York. In 1980, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois where he identified and characterized membrane proteins that play a role in photosynthetic electron transport. From 1980-83 John was a post-doctoral fellow at Rockefeller University where he conducted research on the molecular biology of chloroplasts. He joined the faculty at Texas A&M University in 1983. He helped establish and was Director of the Institute for Plant Genomics and Biotechnology from 1991-2005. His research interests include the genetic basis of plant drought tolerance, sorghum genomics, and the genetic improvement of bioenergy crops.

Lecture Information

Plants are very efficient low cost biological solar energy collecting systems that capture and utilize solar energy to build a diverse set of carbon/nitrogen-based polymers (i.e. sugars, starch, cellulose, lignin, proteins). The biomass accumulated by plants over the course of a growing season is a form of stored energy that can be used to generate power (with minimal net CO2 emission), or converted into liquid transportation fuels and other useful chemicals and bioproducts. The Texas A&M University System has a substantial program focused on the development of sorghum as a premier bioenergy crop for the emerging bioenergy industry.  This effort was recently accelerated by the Department of Energy's release of the sorghum genome sequence providing a blueprint for the design process. This talk will describe the design process and long term potential for this new bioenergy crop.