The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has committed another round of funding to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to lead the second phase of its Bioenergy Research Center — one of four large-scale DOE-funded research centers focused on innovation in biofuels, bioproducts, and a clean energy future for the country.
Miscanthus is one of the most promising perennial crops for bioenergy production since it is able to produce high yields with a small environmental footprint. This versatile grass has great potential to perform even better, as much less effort has been put into improving it through breeding relative to established commodity crops such as maize or soybean.
Scientists have developed and deployed a series of new imaging and machine-learning tools to discover attributes that contribute to water-use efficiency in crop plants during photosynthesis and to reveal the genetic basis of variation in those traits.
The findings are described in a series of four research papers led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduate students Jiayang (Kevin) Xie and Parthiban Prakash, and postdoctoral researchers John Ferguson, Samuel Fernandes and Charles Pignon.
Like atmospheric methane and carbon dioxide, ground-level ozone is on the rise. But ozone, a noxious chemical byproduct of fossil fuel combustion, has received relatively little attention as a potential threat to corn agriculture.
Do you like a classic summer camp, one that offers new friendships, field trips, treasure hunts, and sweet treats? Or are you looking for the best that a science camp has to offer: laboratory visits, high-resolution microscopes, exotic live insects, and 3D printing?
Four Illinois professors have been elected 2018 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, including two from the IGB.
An Illinois professor is part of a multi-institutional research project that has received a 5-year, $16 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to work with sorghum in an effort to optimize photosynthesis and water use efficiency.
The societal stakes for assessing climate change impacts on agriculture and food supply are incredibly high. To meet this need, sophisticated computer models have been developed that simulate how crops grow and are influenced by their environment. They are like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, with a multitude of interacting factors that must be correctly assembled.
Most summer day camps rely on some standard activities to entertain their attendees—indoor and outdoor games, crafts, field trips, and snacks. The middle school girls who attended Pollen Power camp at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) in mid-July enjoyed all these activities, but with some unique touches: plants and insects, fiber optics and lenses, microscopes and green screen recordings all played a big role in the camp’s agenda.
In the summer of 2012, two undergraduate students tackled a problem that plant ecology experts had overlooked for 30 years. The students demonstrated that different plant species vary in how they take in carbon dioxide and emit water through stomata, the pores in their leaves. The data boosted the accuracy of mathematical models of carbon and water fluxes through plant leaves by 30 to 60 percent.
The researchers, based at the University of Illinois, report their findings in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
