Botanist/mom Aisha Goodman convinces our host plants are so important they need a whole episode and biochemistry professor Chris Gisriel takes her on a tour of photosynthesis to learn about where plants get their matter. Things go a little haywire when the miniaturizer is broken and our host and her guest are flung backwards in time to learn why plants matter.

While cheese production creates one of Wisconsin’s most recognizable foods, it also generates whey permeate, a lactose-rich liquid by-product that costs the dairy industry millions of dollars each year to manage. Victor Ujor’s lab engineers microorganisms that transform whey permeate and other agricultural by-products into valuable chemicals used in biofuels, biodegradable plastics, pharmaceuticals, and other everyday products.

One hundred million years ago, long before human intervention, ancestors of grasses, like wheat, rice and maize generated “bypasses” of chemical pathways that are used to create two critical compounds: lignin and starch.

Welcome to Energy 101, the podcast where Wisconsin Energy Institute communications intern Nalina Cherr brings experts questions both nebulous and microscopic about energy and leaves with more than she came with. 

Our new podcast, Energy 101, is a truly unique and fun podcast that explores principles of energy through the lenses of chemistry, botany, and biology that blends science and creativity.

A fourth-year PhD student in biochemistry, Rose Lizzo studies proteins that regulate production of enzymes that enable a bacterium called Zymomonas mobilis to turn plant sugars into sustainable fuels and chemicals.

A team of international researchers led by the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center used alternate NMR methods to produce clearer pictures of molecular structures in lignin, a complex matrix of potentially-valuable molecules found in plant cell walls.