“New Horizons in Plant Sciences” is a document recently released by the National Academies (Science, Engineering Medicine) in the United States. It outlines the 21^st century challenges and opportunities of plant sciences/plant genomics research in different application areas. Based on an ‘expert consensus report” by the National Research Council , the document explores the potential of “research in plant sciences, to understand and ultimately harness plants' properties to help meet agriculture, nutrition, energy, and human health needs.” In the area of biofuels, the report focused on ethanol, a major biofuel in the United States. The consensus was toward the use of lignocellulosic biomass as feedstock for cellulose ethanol production. But while lignocellulosic biomass has lesser agricultural inputs (water, fertilizer, pesticides) relative to corn ( the present ethanol feedstock), the processing technologies for converting lignocellulosics to ethanol is still a major cost hurdle. Cellulose ethanol production by the common biochemical route involves two main processes: (1) the degradation of “tough” plant cell walls (mainly cellulose tightly wrapped in lignin) into simple sugars, and (2) microbial fermentation of the sugars to ethanol. The challenge of plant science research with biofuel applications can focus on the understanding of “how plant genes control the composition and structure of their cell walls;”  these could one day lead to the development of “new energy crops with cell walls that are easy to deconstruct." The free document can be accessed at the above website..