Thursday, December 22, 2011
A generally accepted, 44-year-old assumption about how certain kinds of bacteria make energy and synthesize cell materials has been shown to be incorrect by a team of scientists led by Donald Bryant, the Ernest C. Pollard Professor of Biotechnology at Penn State and a research professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Montana State University. The research, published in the journal Science on Dec. 16, is expected to help scientists discover new ways of genetically engineering bacteria to manufacture biofuels -- energy-rich compounds derived from biological sources. Many textbooks, which cite the 44-year-old interpretation as fact, likely will be revised as a result of the new discovery. (more)
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Sharon Hammes-Schiffer, the Eberly professor of biotechnology and a professor of chemistry at Penn State University, has been elected a 2010 Fellow of the American Physical Society. Hammes-Schiffer, an acknowledged world leader in biophysics whose research spans the fields of chemistry, physics, biology and computer science, has received this honor for her work in developing and applying new and insightful theories in the field of chemistry. (more)
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Penn State Harrisburg has begun construction of a specialized 3,500-square-foot greenhouse complex, the first phase of a planned $1.6 million biotechnology research and teaching facility. A Sept. 16 groundbreaking ceremony marked the start of the greenhouse project, which is expected to be completed late this year. (more)
Monday, May 04, 2009
An international team of scientists has determined the structure of the chlorophyll molecules in green bacteria that are responsible for harvesting light energy. The team's results one day could be used to build artificial photosynthetic systems, such as those that convert solar energy to electrical energy. A research paper about the discovery was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The scientists found that the chlorophylls are highly efficient at harvesting light energy. "We found that the orientation of the chlorophyll molecules make green bacteria extremely efficient at harvesting light," said Donald Bryant, Ernest C. Pollard Professor of Biotechnology at Penn State and one of the team's leaders. According to Bryant, green bacteria are a group of organisms that generally live in extremely low-light environments, such as in light-deprived regions of hot springs and at depths of 100 meters in the Black Sea. The bacteria contain structures called chlorosomes, which contain up to 250,000 chlorophylls. "The ability to capture light energy and rapidly deliver it to where it needs to go is essential to these bacteria, some of which see only a few photons of light per chlorophyll per day." (more)
Monday, October 13, 2008
Two million tourists visit Yellowstone National Park each year to watch wildlife and view the spectacular scenery. Scientists home in on its hot springs, exploring their ecology and plumbing their scalding waters in search of highly adapted, heretofore-undiscovered microorganisms. Don Bryant, Ernest C. Pollard Professor of Biotechnology at Penn State, and David Ward, a microbial ecologist at Montana State University, found a new heat-loving bacterium that survives by transforming light into chemical energy. Bryant characterizes finding this new chlorophyll-producing microbe as "the discovery of a lifetime." (more)
