When Biological and Environmental Engineering  Professor Larry P. Walker looks at plants, he sees,  among other things, 40 percent cellulose that can  be broken down into fermentable sugars that can be  biologically converted to produce ethanol and other  industrial products.

The trick is to develop efficient and cost-effective  cellulose degrading enzymes—cellulases—for  converting cellulose into low-cost sugars. “Our longterm  goal is to understand the molecular mechanisms  of cooperative interaction between cellulases and how  the morphological features of insoluble cellulose—  such as pore size distribution and crystalline  structure—influence the binding and catalytic activity  of cellulase cocktails,” he says.

In pursuing this research objective, Walker is  collaborating with Professor Harold Craighead in Applied Engineering and Physics to use Total  Internal Reflection Fluorescence Microscopy (TIRFM)  and Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS) to  observe and quantify the surface mobility of cellulases  on microcrystalline cellulose. He also has an active  collaboration with Professor James Gossett, director of the School of Civil and Environmental  Engineering, on the pretreatment of switch grass,  a perennial grass, to fractionate it into the various  carbohydrate components and to yield a cellulose  substrate that is more susceptible to subsequent  enzymatic hydrolysis.

Biological and Environmental Engineering Professor Norman Scott predicts that when hydrogen fuel cells come down in price a good application for them will be in converting farmstead biogas to electricity and thermal energy.

“The ready supply of methane on dairy farms makes farms one of the most likely stationary users of this fuel source,” Scott says, noting that methane biogas is just like natural gas except that it yields 60 percent of BTUs. Already, some farms capture methane from manure by trapping the gas and then they pump it into internal combustion generators. Fuel cells will be more efficient. They just have to become cheaper, Scott says.

Can farms become energy sources for their surrounding communities and for related enterprises such as greenhouses and fish farms that have high energy demands?

“That’s the question we’re asking,” Scott says, “which is part of an even bigger question: Can agriculture be a source not only for food but also for the raw materials for bio-industries and energy?”