Foreword

In the last hundred years, fossil fuels have changed the life of human society in a fantastic way. Human mobility, new composites, and petrochemicals have dramatically improved the quality of life in the developed world. The broad use of charcoal for electricity generation, particularly in North America and Europe, has allowed industry to grow very fast and at a low cost, based on a large consumption of energy on a per capita basis. As a consequence, emissions of air pollutants by transportation systems based on fossil fuels have imposed major losses in health quality, particularly in big cities. Greenhouse gas emissions are expected to reach critical values by the end of this century, endangering the maintenance of life on our planet. The consequences of keeping up the same pace of energy consumption based on fossil fuels are already well known, and a major concerted effort among all nations is necessary in order to prevent global warming. Renewable energies are the best solution for maintaining the growing demand for energy and at the same time avoiding the problems caused by the use of fossil fuels. One of the reasons for adopting renewable energy alternatives is the fall in their production costs, making them highly competitive with other sources of energy. Biomass is more and more becoming an alternative for the production of biofuels, as well as becoming the raw material for a newborn chemical industry based on renewable sources. In the following chapters, the reader is presented with several topics related to biomass production, from plants to algae. Modern techniques applied to plant tissue culture, genetic transformation, plant breeding, and functional genomics are presented in a smooth and highly informative way.