It can’t move like R2-D2 or C-3PO, but the world’s only biomass analysis robot, iWall, may help researchers in the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) at Michigan State University create biofuels more quickly and efficiently.

Markus Pauly (right), explains how the iWall works to Gov. Jennifer Granholm (center) and MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon at the GLBRC open house on Sept. 12.

The robot showed off its biomass grinding and dispensing skills to Gov. Granholm and MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon at the GLBRC open house on Sept. 12 in the MSU Conservatory.

iWall was designed and built to the specifications of Markus Pauly, MSU associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, by Labman Automation, a British company. Pauly, who leads the GLBRC analytic service group, studies plant cell walls and how they can be manipulated so they’re easier to break down and convert into biofuels. (more…)

A team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has developed a process that creates transportation fuel from plant material.

The alternative fuels developed by UW chemical and biological engineering professor James Dumesic and his team look a lot like the gasoline and diesel fuel used in vehicles today. That’s because the new fuels are identical at the molecular level to their petroleum-based counterparts. The only difference is where they come from.

A paper published in the Sept. 18 online version of the journal Science explains how they convert sugar into molecules that can be efficiently upgraded into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy and is being published Thursday in the online version of the journal Science.

Many researchers have been focusing on trying to use nonedible materials instead of corn to make ethanol. They work with sugar materials from agricultural waste, corn leaves and stalks, switchgrass and forest residue. But instead of converting the water-soluble sugars derived from the cell walls of plants to ethanol, the new UW process could be used to convert sugars directly into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel components, Dumesic said. (more…)

Michigan State University scientists have identified a protein required for photosynthesis that could ultimately lead to plants designed for biofuel production.

Professor Christoph Benning and other MSU researchers discovered the protein that is necessary for development of chloroplasts — the machinery of photosynthesis, which uses light and energy to convert carbon dioxide into carbohydrates for plant food and oxygen.

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EAST LANSING - If everything goes according to plan, the genetically modified rutabagas growing in a greenhouse across the street from Christoph Benning’s Michigan State University laboratory could have a consistency something like avocados. Squishy. Oily. Just a little more purple.

Benning and his fellow researchers have inserted a gene called wrinkled1 into the rutabagas that regulates the conversion of carbohydrates into oil.

The hope is that the gene will make the rutabagas produce oil rather than starch inside their bulbous roots, turning these cold-resistant root vegetables into a viable biofuel crop for Michigan. It will be at least six months before Benning, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, knows for sure.

Plant oils are among the best potential sources of biofuel. They’re rich in energy, easy to extract and convert.

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EAST LANSING, Mich. — Scientists at Michigan State University have identified a new protein necessary for chloroplast development. The discovery could ultimately lead to plant varieties tailored specifically for biofuel production.

Chloroplasts, which are specialized compartments in plant cells, convert sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into sugars and oxygen (”fuel” for the plant) during photosynthesis. The newly discovered protein, trigalactosyldiacylglycerol 4, or TGD4, offers insight into how the process works.

“Nobody knew how this mechanism worked before we described this protein,” said Christoph Benning, MSU professor of biochemistry and molecular biology. “This protein directly affects photosynthesis and how plants create biomass (stems, leaves and stalks) and oils.”

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Q. We keep hearing about alternative fuels. What will be the most likely fuel to replace gasoline?

A. Today, ethanol is a fuel additive used to replace or decrease the need for fossil fuels in trucks, automobiles and other engines. Most of this ethanol comes from the sugars within corn kernels, but the search for other sources of sugar is under way.

“The likely candidate? Ethanol made from sugars in cellulose, or ‘grassoline,’ as one of my fellow researchers likes to call it,” said Tim Donohue, a professor of bacteriology at UW-Madison and the director of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center.

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In the fight against global warming, carbon is key.

Stabilizing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere so we can all continue to live in the type of climate we ‘re accustomed to is going to require drastic reductions in the amount of fossil fuels used to power our vehicles, operate our businesses and heat our homes.

Meeting these challenges will be difficult, and things certainly won ‘t happen overnight. But it is absolutely vital that we start implementing efficiency measures now, while researchers continue their efforts to develop and perfect the renewable energy technologies of the future.

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At last month’s international biotech convention in San Diego, one of the seminars focused on the work underway at three U.S. Department of Energy laboratories – including the lab in Madison that will be funded with $135 million over five years. With good reason, a description of the seminar included cautionary phrases such as “overcoming cost barriers” and “formidable scientific and technological challenges.”

Replacing or even supplementing fossil fuels such as petroleum won’t happen overnight. It will take years of research, testing and perhaps constructing new infrastructure before oil becomes a less-than-dominant part of our energy portfolio.

“The first kerosene distilled from oil was used in 1853 to replace whale oil to light American homes,” said Brent Erickson, who leads the Industrial and Environmental section of BIO, which hosted the San Diego convention. “It took 125 years for the oil industry to develop oil refineries to what they are today – highly complex and technologically advanced enough to take a barrel of oil and turn it into myriad products.

“We need to think about biofuels in the same light: Ethanol from corn is just the beginning. The second- and third-generation biofuels are coming,” Erickson said.

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Watch Tom Still’s interview on WISN-TV’s “Upfront” show here.

Plant biologists, geneticists, biochemists, bacteriologists, chemical engineers and computer scientists collide in the world of bioenergy, where the search for viable solutions demands intelligence of all kinds. The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has harnessed the intellectual heft to take on this challenge, and they have hired a translator to connect researchers who would normally live in entirely separate research worlds.

That translator — and the new scientific programs manager for the GLBRC — is Steve Slater, a plant and bacterial geneticist.

“I may spend the morning talking to a computer scientist and the afternoon talking to a biochemist,” Slater says. “I know enough to speak the language of all these groups, figure out their needs and make sure we can secure the resources to meet these needs.”

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