Research Highlights

The study assessed soil carbon gains across a variety of marginal soils at experimental sites in Michigan and Wisconsin. Cropping systems were randomly assigned to plots within each of the six unfertilized and untilled sites. Researchers used X-ray computed microtomography to analyze pore structures in harvested soil cores and loose soil surrounding the cores.

Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center scientists have patented technology that can be used to make plants with modified lignin amenable to degradation and production of commodity chemicals used in pharmaceutical drugs and cosmetics, potentially enhancing the value to biorefineries.

The newly patented process uses water as the solvent, no chromatography, inexpensive reagents, no protecting groups, and scalable technology. Modifications  of  this  process  have  the  potential  to  produce  an array of chemical building blocks for the manufacturing materials and chemical products like plastics, surfactants, pigments, and pharmaceuticals.

Researchers assembled genomic, metabolic, and ecological data for 1,154 yeast strains, which represent nearly all known species in the subphylum Saccharomycotina, and quantified variation in genome sequence, isolation environment, and carbon and nitrogen metabolism.

Researchers surveyed a database of 4,400 diverse bacterial genomes, using comparative genomics to identify orthologs of MEP and mevalonate pathway genes. In particular, they looked for alternatives to circumvent the IspG and IspH enzymes, which pose known engineering constraints, or to Dxs, for which some alternatives exist.

Researchers identified the sorghum genes responsible for making and breaking down raffinose family oligosaccharides (RFOs) and analyzed their activities in different leaf and stem cell types. The results indicate RFOs are produced in leaf cells responsible for photosynthesis and broken down in veins, releasing sucrose where it can be transported throughout the plant. This suggests that RFOs improve sucrose distribution by enhancing short-distance movement within organs.  

With fewer than 2,000 protein-encoding genes, Zymomonas mobilis has fewer than half the genes of its closest relatives, is good at converting sugar into ethanol, and able to thrive with or without oxygen. This combination of simplicity, efficiency, and versatility make Z. mobilis a promising model for understanding biology and a potential industrial workhorse. Yet the genes required for growth in various conditions have not been well studied.

Despite having the genes needed for respiration, Zymomonas mobilis grows better without oxygen. Even more puzzling, disrupting respiratory genes actually improved its aerobic growth in previous studies, sparking decades of research and debate over the benefits of respiration. Here, scientists showed that Zymomonas uses respiration mainly to lower oxygen levels and protect cells from damage rather than to produce energy.

Muconic acid is a chemical building block that can be used to make plastics such as those used in food and drink packaging, which are typically made from fossil fuels. Here, scientists genetically modified strains of the soil bacterium Novosphingobium aromaticivorans that produce muconic acid from an underused but abundant type of plant fiber called lignin.

Xylose is the second-most abundant sugar in plant biomass. Most yeasts cannot eat xylose even though many have the required genetic pathway. This study showed that gene content is necessary but not sufficient for xylose metabolism and that codon optimization can be a predictor of this trait.