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Biofuel novice
Research by chemistry's Emily Smith may change the face of Iowa agriculture
- Biofuels wasn't an area that Emily Smith had worked on before. Or for that matter, was even interested in.
As a post-doc at the University of Arizona, Smith studied how a particular protein interacts to contribute to cancer metastasis. She continued that research when she became an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry last fall.
"After coming here, though, I realized it (biofuels) was a very wide-open opportunity," she said. "I hadn't been interested in biofuels before. But after finding out there were so many people on campus with expertise in plants, I thought this was a good area to work in."
There's also another benefit.
"While I haven't done a lot of work with plant samples, I've found that they are much easier to work with than animal cells," Smith says. "Animal cells you have to keep alive. When plants are converted to ethanol or biofuels, you don't have to keep those samples alive."
A third benefit made it logical for Smith to focus a part of her lab's energies on biofuels.
"This is a highly fundable area and should be for the next several years," she said.
Smith has already taken advantage of that funding opportunity. Her work on biofuels is jointly funded through a two-year grant from Iowa State's Plant Sciences Institute and by the Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy Sciences. Smith is affiliated with the DOE's Ames Laboratory.
And the work may also be groundbreaking.
An analytical chemist, Smith is using Raman imaging to study plant cell structure to determine which crops offer the right combination of cell wall composition and degradation to maximize the materials' conversion to ethanol.
Raman imaging technology uses an optical microscope to direct a laser onto a plant sample. When the laser light interacts with the sample, some of it is scattered at different wavelengths compared to the original light. By analyzing the scattered light with a spectrometer, Smith can quickly acquire information used to determine the chemical makeup of the plant material.
If her research is successful, a simplified version of the test could even be used in Iowa fields to determine if plants were at the prime stage to be harvested.
"Just like vintners monitor and test the sugar content of their grapes in the field, biofuel producers could potentially use this technology to determine if their crop was at optimal development for conversion to ethanol," she said.
Her goal is to improve ethanol yields per acre of biomass by correlating plant composition and cell wall degradation with ethanol conversion efficiency. She also hopes to determine if a particular biofuel plant stock such as switchgrass, Miscanthus, poplar, corn or willow could become the best raw material for ethanol production. If that's the case, then millions of acres of farmland could be converted from corn to grass production.
But it's not only biofuel production that Smith's research could change. If the Raman imaging works, the technology could also be used to study other plant materials, such as those used for pharmaceuticals.
Around LAS
September 3-16, 2007
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