Current research projects in the Cellular Engineering Laboratories:

This project is supported by the Ohio Third Frontier Advanced Energy Program and the Department of Energy.

Interest in the production of fuel ethanol from renewable sources has increased significantly as petroleum prices have risen. Biomass, which includes all plant and plant derived material, forms a potential renewable source of sugars, which can be fermented to produce fuel ethanol and a variety of other fuels and chemicals.

Lignocellulosic biomass consists of three major components: cellulose (30-40%), hemicellulose (20-30%), and lignin (5-10%). Of these, cellulose and hemicellulose constitute the polysaccharides that can be hydrolyzed to sugars that could be fermented to ethanol. For the conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to bioethanol to be economically feasible, it is essential that all sugars derived from the saccharification be converted to ethanol.

Unfortunately, no known native organisms are able to efficiently ferment both glucose and xylose, the majority sugars, to ethanol. To enable the use of industrially-proven yeast for fermentation of both sugars, we have developed an immobilized enzyme system that allows for efficient fermentation of both glucose and xylose to ethanol. Our works continues to improve the design and efficiency of this process and to further reduce the costs of cellulosic ethanol production.

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Degeneration of the intervertebral disc is a leading source of chronic spinal disorder/pain and hospital visits. Numerous spinal pathologies result from disc degeneration, including segmental instability, spondylolisthesis, spinal stenosis, disc herniation, and discogenic back pain. Collectively, these disc degeneration related problems account for 80 percent of all elective surgeries on the spine and an annual health-care cost exceeding $30 billion. Surgeons perform an estimated 300-400 thousand microdiscectomies annually where the damaged central disc tissue is removed. The goal of this project is to develop a tissue engineered spinal disc that can be used as a replacement for a damaged or degenerated disc.

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This project has been sponsored by the Whitaker Foundation (RG-99-0127) and the Skin Cancer Foundation. 

Melanoma is the most lethal form of skin cancer. The likelihood of melanoma metastasis in later stages of the disease makes patient survival critically dependent on early detection. Currently, a suspicious skin lesion is identified as melanoma by visual and tactile inspections of the skin. However, in its early, most treatable stages, this method of lesion identification is not accurate.

The hypothesis that has been explored in this research is that normal skin lesions and melanoma have different and detectable responses to light. This research exploits the physical and biochemical differences between normal skin lesions and melanoma by relying on autofluorescence of native fluorescent molecules in the tissue, such as collagen, elastin, NADH and FAD. However, when collecting autofluorescence from tissue, the desired signal is often small in comparison to the backscattered autofluorescence signal coming from deeper within the tissue. To amplify the signal coming from cells in the upper layers of a tissue and minimize the contribution from cells and matrix within the dermal layer, we use polarized excitation light and collect the polarized fluorescence signal from the tissue.

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