Bioconversion Research (Environmental)

Fungal degradation: In biomass deconstruction (bioconversion) research, enzymes are typically used to depolymerize the components of biomass after a "pretreatment" is done to help open the structure of the biomass. Because enzymes are too large to penetrate the intact structure of plant/wood cell walls this can make enzymes very inefficient relative to deconstructing plant/wood cell walls. In nature, some fungi known as the "brown rot" fungi have developed a low molecular weight system to generate oxygen radicals that can rapidly penetrate, and then deconstruct, plant cell walls. The low molecular weight system known as the "chelator-mediated Fenton" (CMF) system  rapidly depolymerizes the two basic building blocks of wood which are cellulose (holocellulose) and lignin. The model brown rot organism that we have used for much of our research, Gloeophyllum trabeum, uses the CMF mechanism, and in our lab we are trying to better understand the chemistry that underpins this mechanism.