cell walls
Drilling down to the nanometer depths of leaves for biofuels
In a paper appearing online in the journal Plant Physiology, a team from Lawrence Livermore led by Michael Thelen, in collaboration with researchers from…
Scientists find new genes for cancer, other diseases in plants, yeast and worms
The University of Texas at Austin scientists exploited the fact that all life on Earth shares common ancestry, and therefore shares sets of genes.They found…
Convergent Evolution in Lignin Biosynthesis: Tools for Re-Engineering Biomass Composition
Lignin is the double-edged sword of biofuels: if you are making cellulosic ethanol, you want less lignin because it blocks the breakdown of cellulose. If you…
Researchers harness the power of plants to fight hemophilia
And the very treatments that can help can also put patients' lives at risk.The standard treatment is infusion with an expensively produced protein that helps…
Wine vine: Microscopic photography reveals bacteria destroying grape plant cell wall
Like a band of detectives surveying the movement of a criminal, researchers using photographic technology have caught at least one culprit in the act.In this…
USDA scientists sequence genome of grass that can be a biofuel model crop
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists and their colleagues at the Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute today announced that they have…