Essentially you'd be left with a scaffold that you could impregnate other materials into.
Hopefully you can get the plant to absorb chemicals that will dissolve the lignin while leaving the cellulose structure in tact.
You would have a spongy open pored structure that could be used as a building block for composite materials, insulation or other things like perhaps a filter.-- lostmind, Dec 27 2011 Andrew Jordan http://theurbandail...ars-for-child-porn/Aka "Skullduggery" [bungston, Dec 27 2011] Will the real Andrew Jordan please stand up? http://digitalcommo...w%20jordan%20umo%22Here's the thing my friend created, but no mention of de-lignification (I presume because he couldn't make it work) [Alterother, Dec 29 2011] There should be a way to do this. Search for bullet proof paper.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Dec 27 2011 An engineer friend of mine, with whom I have been out of touch for over a decade, was trying to do just this while working on a master's project. If memory serves, he was replacing lignin with a 'ductile resin' of his own design to create composite wood girders with the strength of steel but greater resiliency. He couldn't accomplish de-lignification, but he and his two cohorts created something else (something similar, I assume) that made them quite wealthy and got them all whisked off to some other part of the country to work for some material development corporation. I don't recall any further details, but if anyone wants to check out his work, his name is Andrew Jordan and he graduated from the University of Maine at Orono (UMO).-- Alterother, Dec 27 2011 Not that Andrew Jordan.-- Alterother, Dec 28 2011 Good to know. I considered his fate to be a lesson in the perils of trying to bake your schemes for personal profit, rather than submitting them to the Halfbakery for the common good.-- bungston, Dec 28 2011 Who was 'that' andrew jordan? sounds an interesting story
saw the link-- lostmind, Dec 29 2011 I played fleetingly with the idea of cubes of fungi and/or bacterial cultured woody goodness (edible tree fungi) but compost hasn't really got any culinary appeal.-- wjt, Dec 29 2011 random, halfbakery