Objective:
To provide the plant cell wall and biomass research communities with improved methods for polysaccharide and lignin structural profiling, based on complete cell wall solubilization and NMR. The aim is to develop and streamline procedures to allow 20-30 samples per day to be profiled.

Approach:
The following improvements to the dissolution/NMR method will be sought: a. Provide the necessary database, via model compounds and isolated components, to characterize component polysaccharides and lignins in whole-cell-wall mixtures. b. Optimize milling conditions for the various biomass sample types and seek alternative solutions that require less rigorous milling. c. Attempt to develop improved rapid dissolution methods that can be performed directly in the NMR tube; determine solvent systems that do not interfere with the correlation contours from polysaccharide and lignin components. d. Develop NMR methods that allow the crucial HSQC-NMR spectra to be acquired in under 1 hour (on the whole cell wall sample). e. Develop methods for databasing and quantifying the 2D-NMR cell wall spectra. f. With collaborators, attempt to develop chemometrics methods that can be applied to 2D-NMR data.