Jesse Labbé: Innovating biotechnology for energy, security and health
Gerald Tuskan, director of the Center for Bioenergy Innovation and a Corporate Fellow at ORNL, has been awarded the Marcus Wallenberg Prize, the world’s highest honor in the field of forestry, for his pioneering work in sequencing and analyzing the first tree genome.
A team of scientists with two Department of Energy Bioenergy Research Centers — the Center for Bioenergy Innovation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — identified a gene in a poplar tree that enhances photosynthesis and can boost tree height by about 30% in the field and by as much as 200% in the greenhouse.
A team led by scientists at ORNL identified and demonstrated a method to process a plant-based material called nanocellulose that reduced energy needs by a whopping 21%, using simulations on the lab’s supercomputers and follow-on analysis.
The United States could triple its current bioeconomy by producing more than 1 billion tons per year of plant-based biomass for renewable fuels, while meeting projected demands for food, feed, fiber, conventional forest products and exports, according to the DOE’s latest Billion-Ton Report led by ORNL.
Four scientists affiliated with ORNL were named Battelle Distinguished Inventors during the lab’s annual Innovation Awards on Dec. 1 in recognition of being granted 14 or more United States patents.
In a discovery aimed at accelerating the development of process-advantaged crops for jet biofuels, scientists at ORNL developed a capability to insert multiple genes into plants in a single step.
A team of scientists led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory designed a molecule that disrupts the infection mechanism of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and could be used to develop new treatments for COVID-19 and other viral diseases.
A team of scientists from LanzaTech, Northwestern University and ORNL have developed carbon capture technology that harnesses emissions from industrial processes to produce acetone and isopropanol
Detecting the activity of CRISPR gene editing tools in organisms with the naked eye and an ultraviolet flashlight is now possible using technology developed at ORNL.
ORNL scientists have modified a single microbe to simultaneously digest five of the most abundant components of lignocellulosic biomass, a big step forward in the development of a cost-effective biochemical conversion process to turn plants into