Objective:
1) To provide the plant cell wall & biomass research communities with improved methods for polysaccharide & lignin structural profiling, based on complete cell wall solubilization & NMR. 2) To develop & streamline procedures to allow 20-30 samples/day to be profiled & to develop chemometric methods that allow this profile to predict digestibility & bioconversion efficiency. The additional funds will be used for the salary of Research Associate Fachuang Lu, some supplies, and travel funds.

Approach:
Improvements to the current dissolution/NMR methods will be sought: 1) Provide the necessary database, via model compounds & isolated components, to characterize component polysaccharides & lignins in whole-cell-wall mixtures. 2) Optimize milling conditions for the various biomass sample types & seek alternative solutions that require less rigorous milling. 3) 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 & lignin components. 4) Develop NMR methods that allow the crucial 1D-proton & 2D-HSQC NMR spectra to be acquired in under 1 hour (on the whole cell wall sample). 5) Develop methods for databasing & quantifying the NMR cell wall spectra. 6) With collaborators, attempt to develop chemometrics methods that can be applied to 2D-NMR data.