Understanding the mechanisms that govern bioenergy crop production, breakdown and conversion to bioproducts and biofuel is critical for the development of this alternative renewable energy resource. The wide-scale production of crops for bioenergy will need to rely on marginal lands, which are inherently nutrient poor, to minimize their encroachment on land needed for food production. Improving crop health and yield under these low nutrient conditions and developing crop strains resistant to disease and environmental stressors, are central to the sustainability of bioenergy production. At SSRL, researchers use several capabilities including x-ray fluorescence imaging, spectroscopy, macromolecular crystallography, small angle x-ray scattering, cryo-electron microscopy/tomography and correlative light microscopy methods to investigate plant microbiome and physiology to better understand how rhizosphere interactions and perturbations impact plant function. By using these tools, researchers are able to visualize essential nutrient and/or heavy metal uptake and utilization within plant roots, shoots, stems and leaves, observe the exchange of nutrients from symbiotic microbes to host plants, solve molecular to cellular structures of plant and microbial proteins critical to nutrient uptake, understand the structure and function of novel proteins involved in the generation of biofuel and products, and characterize bio-engineered enzymes used in synthetic biology for a range of sustainability processes.
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