Microfluidics Meets Bioenergy: Challenges and Opportunities

There is a growing interest in the production of carbon-neutral biofuels from cellulosic biomass. The key steps include feedstocks development, biomass deconstruction, and fuels synthesis. Each of these steps require a suite of analytical techniques to enable optimization of process development. Microfluidics-enabled analytical tools can have a significant impact in the field of bioenergy. This talk will provide an overview of microfluidics research at the Joint BioEnergy Institute. We will describe the challenges of the biomass-to-fuels process and the opportunities for microfluidic solutions for biomass analysis analysis, cellulase optimization, and plant cell wall engineering.