The Department of Energy has granted $8 million in federal stimulus money to the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center for plant cell wall imaging and sustainability research.

Half will be allocated to plant cell wall imaging and the other $4 million is for sustainability research.

Plant cell wall imaging creates a “fingerprint” of everything in the wall, which can inform research on biomass energy, specifically feedstock selection, predicting the efficiency of biomass conversion, and optimizing pretreatment and processing, said John Ralph, a UW-Madison biochemistry professor who leads GLBRC’s plant biomass research group.

Fingerprinting could allow the GLBRC to enhance biomass plants, develop new ways to deconstruct plant cell walls and analyze composition of plants.