April 11, 2013
O’Malley, a chemical engineer at UC Santa Barbara, has isolated a fungus that could more easily unlock the sugars used to ferment ethanol.
“It’s been known for a long time that the digestive tract of large herbivores have been good at turning crude cellulose into sugars,” said O’Malley, who presented her findings Thursday at the American Chemical Society’s annual convention in New Orleans.