General outline of the programme

The project will use aspen since it is both model species and high productivity crop. The work is divided into three workpackages, WP1, WP2, and WP3 aiming at specific types of wood modification, improvement of lipid content, xylan properties, and lignin quality, and resulting in specific outputs. These are the areas where we project to achieve most significant gains in engineering desired traits in woody plants and most significant impact in moving into bio-based economy.

The common interest of all WPs is understanding of carbon fluxes to enhance carbon flow to wood polymers as well as engineer carbon flux into novel value-added compounds such as lipids. To achieve desired carbon fluxes, we will carry out carbon-13 fluxomics using newly established flux platform (see the description of this common platform below).
The three WPs will use common resources, such as specific analyses, field trials, FuncFiber/BioImprove transgenic clone collection, which are described below.