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Sustainable cropping systems

Core leaf-bound microbes identified for two key bioenergy crops

Stems, leaves, flowers, and fruits make up the biggest chunk of potential living space for microbes in the environment, but ecologists still don’t know a lot about how the microorganisms that reside there establish and maintain themselves over the

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| Allison Zahorec
When one envisions a typical midwestern farm, ‘biodiversity’ is hardly the first thing that comes to mind. Compared to more natural landscapes, agricultural lands can seem like ecological dead zones. Yet even the most intensively managed corn monocultures are teeming with life belowground. A few teaspoons of soil can contain over a billion individual organisms (largely microbes), and the diversity of soil-dwelling organisms is just as impressive.
| Alex Holloway

The microbiome offers nearly limitless potential for research in areas from wastewater treatment to pharmaceutical drug production. University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers have published a paper encouraging colleagues to adopt common engineering methods to further microbiome research and development.

| Mark E. Griffin

Stems, leaves, flowers, and fruits make up the biggest chunk of potential living space for microbes in the environment, but ecologists still don’t know a lot about how the microorganisms that reside there establish and maintain themselves over the course of a growing season.

| GLBRC staff
Inspired by bacteria’s role in natural plant decay, researchers at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center and Michigan State University have mimicked a bacterial pathway to break down the toughest parts of a plant in preparation for biofuel processing.
| Kaine Korzekwa and Brian Mattmiller

The University of Wisconsin-Madison effort to launch a shared cryo-electron microscopy facility for the bioscience community is gathering momentum, with two new faculty hires and key technology investments this summer.

| Jill Sakai

Prolific biofuels researcher James Dumesic has been named the winner of the 2019 Eni Energy Transition Award.

| Hannah Harms

Each year, the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) hosts a group of undergraduate students to participate in the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, designed to immerse students in research. This summer, 11 undergraduate students joined laboratories at Michigan State University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

| Justin Whitmore

Michigan State University (MSU) researcher Alexandra Kravchenko and several of her colleagues recently discovered a new mechanism determining how carbon is stored in soils that could improve the climate resilience of cropping systems and also reduce their carbon footprints.

| Jill Sakai

With a new method to synthesize a popular pain-relieving medication from plants rather than fossil fuels, researchers at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center have found a way to relieve two headaches at once.

| Anne-Sophie Bohrer
Senior postdoctoral research associate at Michigan State University and GLBRC researcher Anne-Sophie Bohrer recaps her experience at this year's Fascination of Plants Day at MSU, an annual event she has been coordinating for the past three years.

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