News

Grace Gooley is a senior at the University of Wisconsin–Madison majoring in chemistry and environmental studies. She’s working on her senior thesis in the Ive Hermans lab, where research focuses on the sustainable synthesis of chemicals using catalysts with the goal of producing commercial compounds in ways that generate less waste, consume less energy, or emit less greenhouse gases than existing techniques.

UW–Madison professor Holly Gibbs was recognized for outstanding contributions to understanding of global environmental change, while Jiquan Chen, a professor at Michigan State University, was honored for a distinguished record of research that has advanced the discipline of geography.

Transcription factors are proteins that bind to DNA inside a cell, activating or blocking the expression of a particular gene. Accurately predicting these gene regulators is a key step to making more productive and stress-resistant crops. But the complex interactions between DNA, RNA, and proteins within cells make this difficult, and scientists lack comprehensive datasets for most crop species. Therefore, scientists with the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center developed a user-friendly pipeline to identify the transcription factors that regulate target genes associated with important traits.

Inspired by the GLBRC, a middle schooler from Utah designed an experiment to test how enzymes affect the production of cellulosic biofuel.

GLBRC postdoc Blaise Manga Enuh published an essay in The Conversation about his work on a genome-scale metabolic model of Novosphingobium aromaticivorans, a bacterium that can convert very complex chemicals in plant waste to valuable bioproducts.

Isobutanol is a promising biofuel with advantages over ethanol: it holds more energy, is less corrosive, doesn't evaporate as fast when blended with gasoline, and can be upgraded into other products like jet fuel. But making isobutanol from non-food plant fibers is challenging. This study estimated a biorefinery could produce isobutanol for a break-even price as low as $14.40 for the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline and showed how improvements in some parts of the process could cut that cost by nearly half. 

Junior biology major Lizza Korolev is an undergraduate research assistant in the Sato lab, where she studies yeast with the goal of developing strains that can ferment sugars in switchgrass into sustainable biofuels.

Four scientists with expertise in botany, soil health, and computational biology have joined the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center to support the center's mission of enabling sustainable plant-based fuels. Their projects will explore ways to grow plants that capture more carbon dioxide and store it in useful compounds; the relationship between bioenergy crop systems and soil health; ​and use mathematical and computational modeling to better understand the biology of Zymomonas mobilis, a microbe considered as a potential star in the quest to replace fossil fuels.

UW–Madison scientists with the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center have developed a quick and inexpensive technique for detecting toxins and other harmful substances by using proteins as a biochemical alert system.