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Making fuels and other products from plants requires treating the plant fibers to break apart sugars and other parts of the plant cell wall. The leftover liquid (or liquor) from the process must be treated to remove hazardous compounds before it can be safely thrown away. Therefore researchers have explored reusing spent liquor or extracting the organic compounds for use as fuels or industrial chemicals. Here, researchers identified phenolic compounds, a group of ring-shaped aromatic molecules, in spent liquor from a pretreatment process using ammonia dissolved in water.

Scientists used computer modeling to simulate the movement of every atom in the system to better understand how lignin molecules behave in various organic solvents and how the dissolved lignin building blocks interact with catalyst surfaces. The results showed that some organic solvents are more effective than water at dissolving lignin, causing the molecules to spread out more and increasing the area accessible to interact with the catalyst. Additional modeling showed solvent selection affects how lignin molecules stick to the catalyst surface, a process called adsorption, which can affect the process of dissolving this polymer.  

Two WEI researchers explain the connection between gene editing and clean energy in plain-language essays about their work — one with plants, the other with microbes.

WEI investigator Jean-Michele Ane uses the Hancock Agricultural Research Station to study varieties of corn that pull nitrogen from the air, forgoing the need for expensive and environmentally damaging fertilizers.

Brayan Riascos Arteaga is a third year PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He works in the Noguera lab, where he’s developing ways to utilize manure fibers as a lignocellulosic resource.

Using a process called adaptive laboratory evolution, scientists found that a single genetic change allows N. aromaticivorans to digest acetovanillone, an aromatic compound in biomass that most studied microbes can't digest. DNA analysis predicts that many other bacteria use similar proteins to digest this and other related aromatic compounds.