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Joshi: Unraveling the Mysteries of Cellulose
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Jan. 25, 2005--"We are immersed," says Chandrashekhar Joshi, "in a sea of cellulose."
"It's like air," he says. "We are surrounded by it but we are hardly aware of it. It's in furniture, paper, clothes, film, paint, medicine . . ."
Not to mention the billions of tons of cellulose stored in trees standing out there. "It's the number one organic material in the world, and plants have been making it for a long time, about two billion years," says Joshi, an associate professor in MTU’s School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science.
And it's at the center of a $200-billion forest product industry. So you'd think we'd know a lot about cellulose synthesis by now. But the fact is, we don't. "We still don't know how plants make it," Joshi says.
Joshi, a member of Biotechnology Research Center is unraveling that mystery with a $584,000 National Science Foundation's Early Career Award. And with a second, $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he will explore how to develop trees that produce better quality cellulose in the woody tissues, which would be a boon for the forest products industry.
Joshi's research team has already isolated three enzymes needed to build cellulose in aspen. With the NSF grant, they are determining what roles these enzymes play with the aim of growing trees that produce more cellulose in their trunks and less in their leaves. You would need fewer trees to produce the same amount of, say, newsprint, while saving on energy and other production costs. In addition, the amount of toxic chemicals needed to extract cellulose from wood pulp would be reduced.
Cellulose is a long polymer that forms a dynamic envelope of living plant cells influencing every phase of a plant’s life cycle. With the USDA grant, Joshi will attempt to provide trees with more of the raw material they need to make cellulose: the simple sugar glucose.
Research has shown that woody parts of trees that receive more glucose also have better quality cellulose. Thus, if more glucose can be made available for cellulose production during wood formation, the overall quality of cellulose could be improved.
"Since cellulose fibers are tightly interwoven with human civilization, this could translate into substantial benefits to our society and forest product industries worldwide," Joshi said. |
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