Ames Laboratory looking at makeup of plant cell walls to improve bioenergy production

In Iowa, a team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory will be developing new instrumentation aimed at determining the chemical and structural makeup of plant cell walls to better understand how to convert plant material into bio-energy.

The group, led by principal investigator and Ames Laboratory scientist Emily Smith, is receiving $1 million a year for three years from the DOE’s Office of Science to develop a subdiffraction Raman imaging platform that will provide an unprecedented look at the specific chemical structures of plant cell walls and then determine how best to deconstruct plant material as a source of biofuels.