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Unlocking the potential of a microbe’s unusual appetite
Alex Linz has thousands of multi-talented, microscopic labmates.
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.
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.
New research on transcriptional pausing, which helps control gene expression in cells, will aid in the understanding of the enzyme RNA polymerase — a key player in the process and an important drug target.
If you’ve ever grown carrots in your garden and puzzled over never once seeing them flower, don’t blame your lack of a green thumb.
Carrots, beets and many other plants won’t flower until they’ve gone through winter. The extended cold gives them the signal to flower quickly once spring arrives, providing the plants an edge in the race to produce seeds.
If environmental engineer Daniel Noguera had his way, he would orchestrate a microbiome to pump out higher-value chemical products.
Five Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) researchers have been named to Clarivate Analytics’ 2018 list of “Highly Cited Researchers”.
The organic matter left over after biofuel production is a rich potential feedstock for making additional high-value bioproducts. Analysis of a microbial metabolic network that can break down this conversion residue is a step toward understanding how to engineer microbial communities to optimize production of desired molecules.
An unprecedented comparison of hundreds of species of yeasts has helped geneticists brew up an expansive picture of their evolution over the last hundreds of millions of years, including an analysis of the way they evolved individual appetites for particular food sources that may be a boon to biofuels research.
A compound that has scientists seeing red may hold the key to engineering yeasts that produce better biofuels.
An ideal biorefinery would turn renewable crops into a variety of fuels and products with little waste. A significant challenge in realizing this vision is what to do with lignin, a fibrous and difficult-to-breakdown material in the cell walls of plants that gives them their sturdiness.
