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.
Landis was nominated for distinguished contributions to the field of ecology, particularly for uncovering the role of landscape structure in regulating insect biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Some microbes are skilled at turning plants into biofuels and useful chemicals. Persuade them to do this efficiently enough, and you have the foundation of a bioenergy refinery that generates fuels and chemicals from renewable sources rather than fossil fuels.
Keegstra Fellow Jianping Li is working with Reid Van Lehn and Christos Maravelias to develop a computational framework for designing solvent and extraction processes to separate and recover bioproducts from biomass.
The most promising microbes for making fuels and chemicals from plant material have broad appetites and biosynthetic potential but have not been widely studied in research labs. In three recent studies, scientists report crucial information on how to control genes in unique and promising biosynthetic microbes.
Despite advances in sequencing technologies and computational methods in the past decade, researchers have uncovered genomes for just a small fraction of Earth’s microbial diversity. Because most microbes cannot be cultivated under laboratory conditions, their genomes can’t be sequenced using traditional approaches.
For farmers struggling against economic forces and doing everything they can to keep afloat, grassland biodiversity may be the last thing they want to worry about.
Scientists have identified new transcription factor networks and their dynamic activities that protect the endoplasmic reticulum in situations requiring the production of large quantities of proteins.
An international research collaboration led by VIB-UGent Professor Wout Boerjan, and involving the U.S. Department of Energy Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, has opened up new possibilities for stably fine-tuning the amount of lignin in poplar by applying CRISPR/Cas9 technology.
A new process developed by researchers at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center enables the production of a new platform chemical—a building block which can be converted to a variety of higher value products—from biomass-derived fructose.
MADISON — A national research initiative announced today will place the University of Wisconsin–Madison at the forefront of a revolution in imaging fostered by cryo-electron microscopy and cryo-electron tomography — technologies that can illuminate life at the atomic scale.
