NEWS

Working at the nexus of biology and analytical chemistry, Rich Giannone focuses on one of the keys that makes advances in bioenergy, bioengineering and human health possible – proteins.

Working at the nexus of biology and analytical chemistry, Rich Giannone focuses on one of the keys that makes advances in bioenergy, bioengineering and human health possible – proteins.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Science has selected five Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists for Early Career Research Program awards.

Popular wisdom holds tall, fast-growing trees are best for biomass, but new research by two U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories reveals that is only part of the equation.

Plant-based biofuels can play a key role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and growing these crops in certain landscapes offers net climate benefits compared to other land use options, according to a team of international scientists.

In 2015, all member states of the United Nations pledged to pursue the 17 Sustainable Development Goals set forth by the UN General Assembly in its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have a powerful new tool in the quest to produce better plants for biofuels, bioproducts and agriculture.

Creating biofuels and other products from plant material is a complex process. Among other things, we need chemicals to break down plant cells.

An NC State researcher has developed a new way to get CRISPR/Cas9 into plant cells without inserting foreign DNA. This allows for precise genetic deletions or replacements, without inserting foreign DNA. Therefore, the end product is not a genetically modified organism, or GMO.

A collaboration between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and three other national laboratories has yielded new insight into the ability of bacteria to break down the hardy part of a plant known as lignin.

Meet Tatenda and Wellington Muchero. Wellington is a researcher in biosciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His daughter, Tatenda, had the opportunity to ask him questions about what he does at the lab.

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new method to peer deep into the nanostructure of biomaterials without damaging the sample. This novel technique can confirm structural features in starch, a carbohydrate important in biofuel production.

After several years in the private sector exploring the unknown origins of neurodegenerative brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Chris Ellis thinks one of the keys to solving the mystery is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory: the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

Ellis, a computational microbiologist in the Biosciences Division, is hoping to prove a theory that’s been getting more attention in the biomedical field—that microbes may play a key role in the development of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.

ORISE | SULI Participant Interview with Emilie Sidelinger

The black cottonwood tree, or Populus trichocarpa (poplar), serves as a model organism for scientists studying the structure, growth, development, and genetics of plants. Poplar was the first tree genome scientists sequenced, and now they use it to study topics such as bioenergy, drought tolerance, and wood formation.

Scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have demonstrated a method to insert genes into a variety of microorganisms that previously would not accept foreign DNA, with the goal of creating custom microbes to break down plants for bioenergy.

The poplar (Populus trichocarpa) was the first tree ever to have its genome sequenced. Now you can propagate the poplar yourself, find out how in a few easy steps.

During the CBI Annual Science Meeting in July 2019, Students working in CBI were asked to prepare a three-minute “elevator” speech to describe their science and how it relates to the overall goals of CBI. The following videos represent a subset of the participants in the competition.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. July 22, 2019—A team of scientists led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have discovered the specific gene that controls an important symbiotic relationship between plants and soil fungi, and successfully facilitated the symbiosis in a plant that typically resists it.

The discovery could lead to the development of bioenergy and food crops that can withstand harsh growing conditions, resist pathogens and pests, require less chemical fertilizer and produce larger and more plentiful plants per acre.

ORNL researcher David Kainer is working with scientists from Australia, Germany, and Michigan to isolate Eucalyptus genes for biofuel production. They are investigating the genetic basis of variation in oil yield (terpenes) in blue mallee, a eucalyptus native to Australia.

While studying the genes in poplar trees that control callus formation, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have uncovered genetic networks at the root of tumor formation in several human cancers.

UT-Oak Ridge National Laboratory Governor’s Chair for Biorefining Arthur Ragauskas has built a reputation as a leading researcher in bioenergy and in efficiently turning plant-based materials into fuel.

The TNT Closing system from CBI is a flexible DNA assembly from universal libraries to generate multi-gene constructs was awarded to Gerald Tuskan and Xiaohan Yang have filed a patent application that provides a predefined three-nucleotide (TNT) signature and a buffer system for a quick on-pot reaction. The Gene assembly speed streamlines steps for a system that is up to 80% faster than other assembly systems.

The ORNL team of Daniel Jacobson, Wayne Joubert, Deborah Weighill, and David Kanier developed a new “CoMet” algorithm that allows supercomputers to process vast amounts of genetic data and identify genes that may be more susceptible to pain and opioid addiction as well as promising treatments. By running the algorithm supercomputers are able to successfully process genetic data at a magnitude that is four to five times greater than the latest state-of-the-art approaches. CoMetis currently being used in projects ranging from bioenergy to clinical genomics.

Scientists studying a valuable, but vulnerable, species of poplar have identified the genetic mechanism responsible for the species’ inability to resist a pervasive and deadly disease. Their finding, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could lead to more successful hybrid poplar varieties for increased biofuels and forestry production and protect native trees against infection.

Scientists are using different layers of information combined with new computational approaches to integrate vast amounts of data in a modeling framework. Researchers can now identify genes controlling important traits to target biofuel and bioproduct production.

For decades, biologists have believed a key enzyme in plants had one function—produce amino acids, which are vital to plant survival and also essential to human diets.

But for Wellington Muchero, Meng Xie and their colleagues, this enzyme does more than advertised. They had run a series of experiments on poplar plants that consistently revealed mutations in a structure of the life-sustaining enzyme that was not previously known to exist.

Dr. Gregg Beckham, a recently promoted Senior Research Fellow at NREL, and the Lignin Valorization Team Lead for the Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI), has received the Royal Society of Chemistry, Society of Chemical Industry and Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining Beilby Medal and Prize.

Generating more than 1,000 publications in peer-reviewed journals, ORNL’s pioneering leadership of two Bioenergy Research Centers has encompassed numerous notable scientific achievements, early-stage technologies and commercial licenses for the development of advanced biofuels and bioproducts.

Dr. Richard Dixon, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North-Texas and Research Domain Lead of Accelerative Science in the Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI), has been named a Fellow of the ASPB.

Arthur Ragauskas, Governor’s Chair in Biorefinery and Research Council Member in the Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI) received the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. Marquis Who’s Who, the world’s premier publisher of biographical profiles.

Center for Bioenergy Innovation Director, Jerry Tuskan gives a tour of the greenhouses at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and discusses ongoing projects focused on advanced biofuels, sustainable feedstocks and lignin feedstocks for plastics.

Diverse characterization methods have been developed to elucidate physicochemical, thermal and morphological properties of biomass and its products. Biofuels Digest (biofuelsdigest.com) posted a Guide to Characterizing Lignocellulosic Biomass compiled by CBI members Arthur J.

The Silver Award for “Best Original Article” published in The Plant Journal in 2017 was awarded to the authors of “The Physcomitrella patens chromosome-scale assembly reveals moss genome structure and evolution”. CBI authors included: Lee Gunter, Wellington Muchero, Priya Ranjan, and Gerald A. Tuskan.

A research team led by the University of Georgia has discovered that manipulation of the same gene in poplar trees and switchgrass produced plants that grow better and are more efficiently converted to biofuels. Due to the composition of plant cell walls, plant material is not efficiently broken down or deconstructed to the basic sugars that are converted to biofuels.

Dan Jacobson is illuminating the workings of biological systems from the molecular scale up by leveraging Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s supercomputing resources to create machine and deep-learning techniques more easily understood by humans, an evolving field called explainable artificial intelligence (AI).

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Gerald Tuskan, University of North-Texas’ Richard Dixon and University of California-Riverside’s Charles Wyman make Clarivate Analytics’ highly cited list.

SimPath has licensed a novel cloning system developed by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory that generates and assembles the biological building blocks necessary to synthetically bioengineer new medicines and fuels.

Clean energy innovation has been an essential part of Tennessee’s fabric for more than eight decades. Tennesseans have continued to contribute to some of our nation’s most significant energy technology breakthroughs, and in the process created jobs, increased international competitiveness…

Developing the next generation of biofuels and plant-based alternatives to petroleum-based plastics is happening at the new Center for Bioenergy Innovation in Oak Ridge.

The new center will be housed in the existing greenhouse and lab area of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. ORNL is of one of four locations chosen for the new five-year research project beginning October 1.

Working backwards has moved Josh Michener’s research far forward as he uses evolution and genetics to engineer microbes for better conversion of plants into biofuels and biochemicals.

It’s been 10 years since the US Department of Energy first established a BioEnergy Science Center (BESC) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and researcher Gerald “Jerry” Tuskan has used that time and the lab’s and center’s resources and tools to make good on his college dreams of using genomics to study and improve plant species. Now he is getting ready to lead the new Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI) at ORNL, a DOE Bioenergy Research Center that will launch in FY2018 with the mission of accelerating the development of specialty plants and processes for a new generation of biofuel.

The Department of Energy has announced funding for new research centers to accelerate the development of specialty plants and processes for a new generation of biofuels and bioproducts. The Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI), led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is one of four bioenergy centers chosen by DOE to advance a new biobased economy with the production of fuels and other products directly from nonfood biomass.

Mindy Clark’s enthusiasm for plant biology has only grown from her time in the classroom at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) to her years working in greenhouse operations for private industry and more recently at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

After traveling an unconventional path to get here, Melissa Cregger has found Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) a perfect place to accommodate, and even encourage, her diverse scientific interests.

Brian Davison has advice for anyone planning a long career in science, gleaned from more than three decades in the field: Appreciate the ‘eureka’ moments, both big and small.