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Triptych showing green leaves, a Petri dish, and two glass vials of yellow and amber liquid

Bioenergy Research Centers mark discovery milestone

With a focus on hydrocarbon fuels and chemicals made from non-food plants, the Bioenergy Research Centers are developing a portfolio of plant-based products, methods, and tools for use in an emerging U.S. bioeconomy.

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| 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.
| Mark Griffin
Daniel Amador-Noguez is learning how living organisms transform nutrients into energy and other useful chemicals. Among a cadre of scientists looking at the biological underpinnings of metabolism, Amador-Noguez knows firsthand the links between the fuel that makes our bodies go and the biofuels that propel our machines. Because he studies both.
| Mark E. Griffin

Switchgrass is attractive as a potential bioenergy crop because it can grow for years without having to be replanted. Requiring less fertilizer than typical annual crops like corn, switchgrass can keep more nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon in the soil and out of our air and waterways. But, unlike corn, breeding of switchgrass for optimal traits is still in its early stages.

| Michigan State University
At the conclusion of a pilot study for Michigan State University’s Plant Resilience Institute (PRI), microbial ecologist Ashley Shade had a hunch that started a chain reaction of exciting interdisciplinary and international collaboration and landed Shade and her team a three-year, $750,000 USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) grant to investigate the seed microbiome of the common bean.

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