{"72026":{"#nid":"72026","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Georgia Tech Part of New Biofuel Research Center","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EThe Georgia Institute of Technology is part of a new research team, led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), that has won a bid from the Department of Energy for a $125 million bioenergy research center that will seek new ways to produce biofuels.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EFunded by the Department of Energy\u0027s Office of Science, the Bioenergy Science Center will be located on the ORNL campus in a new facility funded by the state and owned by the University of Tennessee. The center, one of three funded from more than 20 proposals, will employ the interdisciplinary expertise of the team\u0027s partners in biology, engineering and agricultural science  and commercialization to develop processes for converting plants including switchgrass and poplar trees into fuels.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EThe ORNL-led project will focus on new methods of processing plants into biofuel. The strategy involves breaking down into simple sugars the lattice of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin that makes plant cell walls resistant to the stress of weather, insects and disease. These sugars can then be processed into fuel. To date, no cost effective bioprocessing methods for cellulose-based bioenergy sources have been developed. \n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EGeorgia Tech\u0027s primary role in the center will focus on characterization, or the fundamental study of plant cell walls. Tech\u0027s goal will be to study switchgrass\u0027 chemical bonds to help create more efficient methods of breaking the plant down into the sugar needed to make ethanol.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022As part of the center, Georgia Tech will develop new techniques that allow for a very fine detailed analysis of switchgrass,\u0022 said Arthur Ragauskas, one of the primary investigators for Georgia Tech\u0027s portion of the project and a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EThe DOE Bioenergy Science Center will focus on achieving the specific goals of:\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E* Modifying plant cell walls to reduce their resistance to breakdown, with a focus on the poplar tree - whose genome ORNL researchers helped sequence last year-and switchgrass, a native grass that can be easily grown in most of the United States. Such modification would decrease or eliminate the need for costly chemical pretreatments now required.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E* Consolidated bioprocessing, which involves the use of a single microorganism or group of organisms to break down plant matter through a one-step conversion process of biomass into biofuels.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EIn announcing the awards, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said, \u0022These centers will provide the transformational science needed for bioenergy breakthroughs to advance President Bush\u0027s goal of making cellulosic ethanol cost-competitive with gasoline by 2012, and assist in reducing America\u0027s gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years. The collaborations of academic, corporate, and national laboratory researchers represented by these centers are truly impressive and I am very encouraged by the potential they hold for advancing America\u0027s energy security.\u0022\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EIn addition to ORNL, other DOE Bioenergy Science Center partners include the University of Tennessee, Dartmouth College, the University of Georgia, the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and companies ArborGen in Summerville, S.C.; Diversa (now Verenium Corp.) in San Diego, and Mascoma in Cambridge, Mass. The team also includes seven individual researchers from across the country. ORNL\u0027s Martin Keller will serve as director for the center.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EOther key participants at Georgia Tech include the Strategic Energy Institute; Eberhard Voit, a GRA Eminent Scholar in systems biology in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University; Cameron Sullards, a principal research scientist and director of the Bioanalytical Mass Spectrometry Facility in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and School of Biology; and Charles Liotta, a distinguished professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and former vice provost of research at Georgia Tech.\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"Georgia Tech is part of a new research team  that has won a bid from the Department of Energy for a $125 million bioenergy research center that will seek new ways to produce biofuels.","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Tech to help develop news ways to create biofuels"}],"uid":"27281","created_gmt":"2007-07-02 00:00:00","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:00:50","author":"Lisa Grovenstein","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2007-06-29T00:00:00-04:00","iso_date":"2007-06-29T00:00:00-04:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"72027":{"id":"72027","type":"image","title":"Tech Tower","body":null,"created":"1449177425","gmt_created":"2015-12-03 21:17:05","changed":"1475894649","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:44:09"}},"media_ids":["72027"],"related_links":[{"url":"http:\/\/www.bioenergycenter.org\/","title":"DoE BioEnergy Science Center"},{"url":"http:\/\/www.energy.gatech.edu\/","title":"Strategic Energy Institute"}],"groups":[{"id":"1214","name":"News Room"}],"categories":[{"id":"141","name":"Chemistry and Chemical Engineering"},{"id":"144","name":"Energy"},{"id":"145","name":"Engineering"},{"id":"146","name":"Life Sciences and Biology"},{"id":"135","name":"Research"}],"keywords":[{"id":"1850","name":"alternative energy"},{"id":"2342","name":"biofuels"},{"id":"2055","name":"Ragauskas"},{"id":"167708","name":"Strategic Energy Initiative"},{"id":"170757","name":"switchgrass"}],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cstrong\u003ELisa Grovenstein\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ECommunications \u0026amp; Marketing\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/www.gatech.edu\/contact\/index.html?id=lgrovenste3\u0022\u003EContact Lisa Grovenstein\u003C\/a\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E404-894-8835\u003C\/strong\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["lisa.grovenstein@comm.gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}