Professor Tim Bugg CChem MUUÂãÁÄÖ±²¥
Being part of a research group gives you a great opportunity to work with other people, to share their knowledge, expertise and ideas, and to learn things in the lab from them.
To combat global warming, we must reduce our dependence on crude oil, which many of our plastics, materials, and industrial chemicals are made from. The 'biorefinery' concept – making fuels and chemicals from renewable plant biomass - is gaining global traction.
Professor Bugg's research group is working on one of the unsolved problems of the biorefinery: how to convert the aromatic polymer lignin into useful chemicals. Lignin is very hard to break down, but the group has discovered several new bacterial enzymes that can break down lignin and studied how these enzymes work at the molecular level. They have also engineered bacterial lignin-degrading bacteria such as soil microbe Rhodococcus jostii RHA1 to produce useful chemicals like vanillin (used in the food industry) and precursors to new bio-based plastics.
This research, along with the work of other research groups around the world, has established the feasibility of converting lignin using low-energy biochemical transformations into feedstock and high-value chemicals.
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