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.
Multilayer plastic materials are ubiquitous in food and medical supply packaging, particularly since layering polymers can give those films specific properties, like heat resistance or oxygen and moisture control.
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.
While climate change is a threat to us all, the effects of our warming planet have a disproportionate impact on communities of color and low income groups.
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.
Mikhail Kats has been studying thermal radiation, the phenomenon by which the vast majority of life in the universe is generated, for much of his life. This is his story.
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.