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Content Tagged "bioenergy"

Button Mushroom Marks Niche in Forest Carbon Storage

Many people know the button mushroom (Agaricusbisporus) as a tasty ingredient in their food. In the forest, though, this mushroom helps break down leaf litter in environments rich with humus, a mixture of soil and compost that contributes to the health of the microbial communities in, on and around the plant as well as the… [Read More]

Comparing White Rots to Shed Light on Wood-Colonizing Habit

White-rot basidiomycetes can degrade all components of lignocellulosicbiomass, including lignin, cellulose and hemicellulose. Thus, harnessing the metabolic potential of these organisms is key to developing cost-effective technologies for the production of renewable energy and value-added co-products from residual plant biomass. A comparative analysis of the white rot fungus, Phanerochaetecarnosa, isolated from softwoods, andPhanerochaetechrysosporium, isolated from… [Read More]

Revisiting the importance of studying the microbes in termite guts

According to Leadbetter, the termite holds the key to unlocking all of this potential. But understanding how to do it won’t be easy.People have enlisted the help of microbes before, but never with this degree of complexity. “For 6,000 years,” he said, “we’ve been making beer, wine and bread using yeast,” which is a single-cell… [Read More]

Understanding a Cereal Disease with DNA Sequencing

An international coalition of researchers, including those from the DOE Joint Genome Institute have now isolated the Barley stripe mosaic virus resistance gene from  Brachypodium distachyon. They found the single dominant gene responsible by analyzing the offspring of intercrossed disease-resistant and disease-susceptible Brachypodium. Their results were published in June in PLoSOne. Brachypodium distachyonis a good… [Read More]

Fungal genomics and coal formation in The Green Optimistic

White rot fungi from the class of fungi known as Agaricomycetes are capable of degrading the polymer lignin. Lignin is found in plant tissues and is largely responsible for the rigid structure of plant cell walls. The researchers postulated that fungal degradation of lignin caused plant matter to be broken down into its basic components and… [Read More]

Fungal genomics and coal formation in Clean Technica

In an ironic twist, genomics researchers have stumbled upon an incredible discovery – the same ancestral fungus that ended coal formation millennia ago may now be able to boost biofuel and bioenergy production. Read more at Clean Technica [Read More]

Fungal genomics and coal formation in BioBased Digest

In Massachusetts, a group of 70 researchers led by David S. Hibbett of Clark University, in Worcester, Mass. and Igor V. Grigoriev of the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute comparing the genomes of 31 fungi to determine how white rot fungi breaks down lignin and could be a major breakthrough in cellulosic ethanol technology. Read… [Read More]

White rot fungal genomics for biopulping in Biomass Magazine

Something special is happening with a research project focused on two white rot fungi genomes. Led by the U.S. DOE’s Joint Genome Institute, a team of international researchers is collaborating on a project to sequence and analyze the fungi strains to understand how enzymes present in the fungi break down plant biomass. It’s not the research… [Read More]

On white rot, coal and biofuels in ClimateWire

The evolutionary rise of a common fungus — white rot — is responsible for the end of underground coal formation 60 million years ago, scientists say in a paper published last week in Science.Ironically, that same fungus could now be a key element to help the world move away from fossil fuels by helping to create… [Read More]

Linking white rot fungi and the Carboniferous period in Scientific American

Now a new genomic analysis suggests why Earth significantly slowed its coal-making processes roughly 300 million years ago—mushrooms evolved the ability to break down lignin. “These white rot fungi are major decomposers of wood and the only organism that achieves substantial degradation of lignin,” explains mycologist David Hibbett of Clark University in Massachusetts, who led the research… [Read More]