News

| Natasha Kassulke
Tim Donohue, UW–Madison professor of bacteriology, has been named director of the Wisconsin Energy Institute. WEI provides leadership in energy and clean technology research, scholarship, education and outreach. The research institute administers collaborative research grants to develop sustainable alternatives to meet society’s ever-growing need for energy and ways to source it.
| Mark E. Griffin
Bioenergy carbon capture and sequestration can increase biorefinery size and economy when incorporated with energy production factors in the making of biofuels and bioproducts.

Entomology doctoral student Allison Zahorec has found meaning through researching tiny arthropods, helping children overcome fear of insects and experiencing scientists opening up to social justice.

| Jill Sakai
Chemists at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center have developed a new technology that converts biomass into both carbohydrates and lignin-derived aromatic monomers in a single step.
| Mary Riker
This week we spoke with Balendra Sah, a postdoctoral researcher in Robert Landick’s lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, to talk about his research into engineering bacteria to make biofuels and what led him to UW–Madison.
| Jill Sakai
"Restoring current marginal croplands to perennial grasses can immediately begin to reverse and improve these trends, thereby offering a clear solution and pathway to improve agricultural sustainability," says Tyler Lark, a researcher with the GLBRC and UW–Madison’s Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies.

The fungi that live in the seeds and in the leaves of plants play a part in the overall health and productivity of their host plants. That role isn’t well-defined despite big implications of that understanding for farmers and other land managers.

| Alison Takemura

You might know sorghum as an edible grain. But there are some sorghum varieties, grown on marginal land with little water, which were developed specifically to turn their biomass into sustainable biofuel and bioproducts. John Mullet, a biologist at Texas A&M University, tells us how sorghum’s historical — and literal — roots could play a big role in our energy future.

| Mary Riker
This week we sat down with Jun Feng, a postdoctoral researcher in Ophelia Venturelli's research group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, to talk about engineering microorganisms for biomanufacturing and what led him to UW–Madison.
| Mary Riker
Researchers at GLBRC and the South China University of Technology have developed a faster and less chemically intensive spectroscopy-based procedure called the Cysteine-Assisted Sulfuric Acid (CASA) method. The approach uses a new reagent combination of the amino acid cysteine and sulfuric acid to completely dissolve lignocellulosic biomass under less extreme conditions than traditional methods.