Bioenergy Research Center Infrastructure: BESC - ARRA

Expansion of Fundamental Research Capabilities of the BESC Leading to Accelerated Biofuels Development -- This will enable acceleration of the research of the Bioenergy Research Centers through the expansion of the research equipment available. This will include captial equipment, as well as large non-capital items and service contracts. The development of the next generation technologies for lignocellulosic-based biofuels will require the integration and coordination of various different scientific disciplines. The BioEnergy Science Center (BESC) led by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) developed an integrated center to overcome one of the major hurdles in generating cost competitive biofuels, namely to overcome biomass recalcitrance. BESC established various workflow pipelines designed to streamline and integrate workflows such as a biomass characterization pipeline and a plant cell wall biosynthesis pipeline. Research conducted during the first 18 months of the BESC project demonstrated the need to expand these integrated characterization, fermentation, and systems biology pipelines to further advance and accelerate microbial strain and plant feedstock characterization.