News

| Layne Cameron

You might think that mowing fields wouldn’t benefit monarch butterfly populations. New research from Michigan State University, however, shows that disturbances like mowing ­– at key times – might help boost the iconic butterfly’s numbers.

| Katie Gerhards

Jason Peters is one of thousands of scientists worldwide aiming to curb the impact of antimicrobial resistance, which is one of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 10 threats to global health in 2019.

| Chris Barncard

With a few genetic tweaks, a type of soil bacteria with an appetite for hydrocarbons shows promise as a biological factory for converting a renewable — but frustratingly untapped — bounty into a replacement for ubiquitous plastics.

| Sam Million-Weaver

Fossil fuels seep their way into almost every aspect of American life.

Transportation, heating and the plastics and chemicals we use every day all rely on petroleum products, but our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels will have catastrophic consequences for the health of the planet if left unchecked.

| Mark E. Griffin
Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center scientists have developed a process model demonstrating that engineering energy sorghum for lipid production would increase the crop’s value as a bioenergy feedstock. Technoeconomic analysis reveals that engineering the plant to produce lipid content allows for refining into biodiesel. This alteration would result in a lower “minimum ethanol selling price” (MESP) than refining traditional energy sorghum.
| Eric Hamilton

An insect’s gut might seem an inhospitable place to settle in, but diverse microbes nonetheless make their home there. Yet in the gut, there’s a struggle for the nutrients needed to survive among the resident bacteria and fungi — not to mention the insect.

| Max Witynski

Alex Linz has thousands of multi-talented, microscopic labmates.

“Why do I love microbes? I think it’s just crazy that they’re all around us, and we can’t see them, and yet if you can dream it up, microbes probably do it,” says the UW–Madison postdoctoral researcher.

| Mark E. Griffin

Bioenergy crops are a potential source of renewable alternatives for many petroleum-derived products. Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) scientists at Michigan State University (MSU) have now devised a system to coax plants into producing higher amounts of two valuable organic materials, terpenes and lipid droplets, and package them together inside cells for easy extraction.

| Eric Hamilton

Lager beer is cold, crisp, dry — and worth about half a trillion dollars worldwide. Behind the world’s most popular alcoholic beverage is a yeast adapted to the cold, and hungry for the sugars it will transform into bubbles and booze.

| Max Witynski

A major goal of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center is to harness the power of microbes to create biofuels. But often, it’s an expensive challenge for scientists to identify the most useful individual variants among thousands of similar microbe strains.