The Importance and Potential of Duckweeds as a Model and Crop Plant for Biomass-Based Applications and Beyond

Abstract

The accelerated explosive growth of human population poses profound threats to sustainable living on the planet in the coming century. Especially finite resources, such as fossil fuels, clean water, and raw materials, will soon become stretched, while the amount of waste and pollution is on the rise. This book chapter examines the broad range of applications in which duckweed, an emerging crop plant, is being used in phytoremediation, wastewater treatment, and in the recently explored fields ranging from biofuels, bioplastics production, and even human food. Being one of the first plant models known to academia, duckweed has been extensively studied because of its unique characteristics including small size, fast life cycles, and ease of aseptic cultivation. Duckweed-based wastewater remediation has been widely applied due to high efficiency of N, P absorption together with low investment and operation cost. The biomass of duckweed (up to 100 tons dry matter/ha/year) has been recently proposed to become a renewable and sustainable feedstock. Available high-quality reference genomes of duckweeds open up an enormous genetic source for modern and sustainable agriculture tools such as genomic selection and genome editing. Importantly, clonal growth (via asexual reproduction) and global distribution of duckweed makes duckweed-based environmental technologies, for instance combination of wastewater treatment and biomass production for bioplastics or biofuels, robust, applicable, and transferable across continents.