Analytical Instrumentation for Biofuels R&D
Wednesday,  March 5, 2008
8:30 a.m., Room 244

Organizer:

Roland F. Hirsch, Office of Biological & Environmental Research,  U.S. Department of Energy

Speakers:

9:05      The BioEnergy Science Center: An Overview--Can New Analytical Instrumentation Help to Overcome the Recalcitrance of Biomass?  MARTIN KELLER, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

9:40       The Joint BioEnergy Institute  PAUL D ADAMS, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory

10:15     Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center: High Throughput Analysis of Plant Materials as a Resource for Biofuels  MARKUS PAULY, Michigan State University, Ken Keegstra, Jonathan Walton

10:50     Three-Dimensional Spatial Profiling of Lignocellulosic Materials by Coupling Light Scattering and Mass Spectrometry PAUL BOHN, University of Notre Dame, Jonathan Sweedler

11:25     High-resolution Solution-state NMR of Unfractionated Plant Cell Walls; Potential for Biomass Selection and Process Optimization  JOHN RALPH, USDA-Agricultural Research Service

Overview:

There is increasing interest in converting biomass to fuels and chemical raw materials as an alternative to using fossil fuels. The conversion of waste biomass, in particular the complex carbohydrate materials that are not as valuable as foods as are starches and sugars, will be the focus of much of the research and development efforts in the coming years. Many obstacles need to be overcome in the processing of lignocellulosic materials (the structural components of plants) to fuels before these resources will be economically and environmentally viable. This symposium will address the analytical technologies needed to enable progress in meeting the goals of large-scale substitution of biomass-derived fuels and chemicals for their fossil-derived counterparts.

The symposium will feature presentations from each of the three new Bioenergy Research Centers funded by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy: the DOE BioEnergy Science Center, led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory; the DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, led by the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and the DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After describing the mission and goals for their center each of the speakers will discuss the analytical instrumentation that will be used in their center, and the limitations of existing technologies that will require analytical R&D for characterizing the raw materials and processes that will be studied by their center.

Two additional presentations will describe analytical research projects that focus on characterizing and imaging lignocellulosic materials undergoing processing to convert them to simpler molecules that can then be converted to fuels and chemicals. One talk will cover the project “A New Solution-State NMR Approach to Elucidate Fungal and Enzyme/Mediator Delignification Pathways” at the USDA Madison laboratory and the other “Three Dimensional Molecular Imaging of Ionic Liquid Processing of Lignocellulosic Materials”, based at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

More information on the Centers and the DOE Bioenergy Research Program can be found at: http://genomicsgtl.energy.gov/centers/  and http://genomics.energy.gov/ .