Posted on Jun 30, 2009 in News Releases, In the Media, Featured | Comments Off
UW-Madison Communications | June 26, 2009 | Margaret Broeren
Nestled within the twisting fungus gardens of leaf-cutter ants exists a complex symbiotic web that has evolved over millions of years. Now, with the help of a major genomic sequencing grant from Roche Applied Science, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will be able to analyze these interactions at the molecular scale.
Bacteriology professor Cameron Currie maintains an Acromyrmex volcanus colony in his UW-Madison laboratory. The ants are located on a spongy fungus garden, which they grow themselves. Photo: B W Hoffmann
“By sequencing genomes of all the major players, we can study the evolution of the system,” says Cameron Currie, a UW-Madison bacteriology professor and one of the project’s lead researchers. “It would be one of the first, if not the first, genomic level study of a community of organisms over evolutionary time.”
As winners of Roche Applied Science’s 10 Gigabase Grant Program, UW-Madison and Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) scientists Currie, Steven Slater and Garret Suen will be part of a team that will use Roche technology to sequence the known members of the ant-fungus symbiosis, which includes three ant genomes and 14 ant-associated fungal and bacterial genomes.
“Three sequenced ant genomes will be truly spectacular,” says Ted Schultz, a research entomologist at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History. “This is going to advance the field a quantum level beyond what is done now.
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Posted on Jun 23, 2009 in In the Media, Featured | Comments Off
This month’s Scientific American cover story was co-authored by GLBRC’s Bruce Dale.
From the July 2009 Scientific American Magazine
Scientists are turning agricultural leftovers, wood and fast-growing grasses into a huge variety of biofuels—even jet fuel. But before these next-generation biofuels go mainstream, they have to compete with oil at $60 a barrel
By George W. Huber and Bruce E. Dale
Getty Images
Key Concepts
- Second-generation biofuels made from the inedible parts of plants are the most environmentally friendly and technologically promising near-term alternatives to oil.
- Most of this “grassoline” will come from agricultural residues such as cornstalks, weedlike energy crops and wood waste.
- The U.S. can grow enough of these feedstocks to replace about half the country’s total consumption of oil without affecting food supplies.
By now it ought to be clear that the U.S. must get off oil. We can no longer afford the dangers that our dependence on petroleum poses for our national security, our economic security or our environmental security. Yet civilization is not about to stop moving, and so we must invent a new way to power the world’s transportation fleet. Cellulosic biofuels—liquid fuels made from inedible parts of plants—offer the most environmentally attractive and technologically feasible near-term alternative to oil.
Biofuels can be made from anything that is, or ever was, a plant. First-generation biofuels derive from edible biomass, primarily corn and soybeans (in the U.S.) and sugarcane (in Brazil). They are the low-hanging fruits in a forest of possible biofuels, given that the technology to convert these feedstocks into fuels already exists (180 refineries currently process corn into ethanol in the U.S.). Yet first-generation biofuels are not a long-term solution. There is simply not enough available farmland to provide more than about 10 percent of developed countries’ liquid-fuel needs with first-generation biofuels. The additional crop demand raises the price of animal feed and thus makes some food items more expensive—though not nearly as much as the media hysteria last year would indicate. And once the total emissions of growing, harvesting and processing corn are factored into the ledger, it becomes clear that first-generation biofuels are not as environmentally friendly as we would like them to be. Read the rest
