An insect’s gut might seem an inhospitable place to settle in, but diverse microbes nonetheless make their home there. Yet in the gut, there’s a struggle for the nutrients needed to survive among the resident bacteria and fungi — not to mention the insect.

Turning bioenergy crops into fuels and other products requires breaking down the complex mixture of polysaccharides found in plant material. Glycoside hydrolase family 5 (GH5) is a large and diverse family of enzymes able to digest a wide range of polysaccharides.

Assistant professor of biochemistry Ophelia Venturelli was recently named to a list of 34 young researchers featured in the journal Biochemistry’s “Future of Biochemistry: The International Issue” special issue.

Five University of Wisconsin–Madison professors have earned prestigious awards from the American Chemical Society (ACS). With more than 156,000 members, ACS is the largest scientific society in the world.

Lager beer is cold, crisp, dry — and worth about half a trillion dollars worldwide. Behind the world’s most popular alcoholic beverage is a yeast adapted to the cold, and hungry for the sugars it will transform into bubbles and booze.

A strategy for transforming waste from the Greek yogurt-making process into a high-value sweetener product might pave the way for millions of extra dollars per year for dairy producers.

A major goal of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center is to harness the power of microbes to create biofuels. But often, it’s an expensive challenge for scientists to identify the most useful individual variants among thousands of similar microbe strains.