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Color-by-number for better biofuel
Oakland Tribune, Aug 10, 2006 by Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
Seed giant Monsanto Co. is tapping scientists inside a nuclear weapons lab to discover the detailed interactions of corn protein and starch -- the stuff of which most U.S. biofuels are made today.
In a partnership with Sandia National Laboratories researchers announced Wednesday, Monsanto scientists expect to learn the roles of molecules inside plant cells and perhaps breed corn hybrids that produce more ethanol.
Breeding corn with more starch alone isn't the answer because a lot of starch remains bound up with proteins or amino acids. It remains untouched by the enzymes that break starch down into sugars in an ethanol biorefinery or by the yeasts that ferment those sugars into ethanol fuel.
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Scientists using high-powered laser microscopes only can glimpse the protein interactions that they need to understand.
But researchers at Sandia labs have invented a kind of hyperspectral imaging that allows them to paint proteins with different fluorescent tags and see the different colors all at once.
That's hard to do, because the colors are very close together in wavelength and it takes a lot of computer power to tease them apart, especially in three dimensions, said Grant Heffelfinger, Sandia's head of computational biology and biofuels research. But with the right software, Sandia scientists trained a computer to create 3-D pictures of proteins flashing in colors as they are built and perform work in bacterial cells. Heffelfinger said they can rotate the images.
"We call it the flying petri dish," he said.
Monsonto wants to use Sandia's hyperspectral fluorescence imaging on plant cells and Wednesday announced a five-year research contract with the lab.
"We need to see what all these components are doing together," Pradip Das, head of Monsanto's crop analytics group, said in an interview Wednesday.
For three years, Sandia scientists in New Mexico will snap daily pictures of plant cells to develop a concept for how proteins and starch molecules interact. The company and the lab are looking at other work, perhaps involving the lab's Combustion Research Facility, an advanced engine design lab in California.
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