Senior Scientist, Dr. Shi-You Ding, from US-National Renewable Energy Laboratory Visiting Biofuels Institute at JU

Dr. Shi-You Ding, adjunct professor of Jiangsu University (JU), from National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) of DOE visited biofuels institute, JU, on October 10, 2013. A presentation, titled as "How do cellulases disassemble (solubilize) the plant cell walls?" was offered by him for all faculty and graduate students at biofuels institute during his stay, which demonstrated his latest discoveries related to ultrastructure of plant cell walls and its degrading mechanism by two different microbial kingdoms, fungi and bacteria, against cellulosic biomass.

Currently, one of the Dr. Ding’s research interests is on label-free chemical imaging techniques, which can be applied for imaging and characterizing ultrastructure of plant cell walls and revealing the interactions between biomass substrates and the added cellulase degrading processing. The nanometer-scale studies of plant cell wall structures would enhance researchers’ ability to precisely elucidate the interactions between biomass structure properties and the degrading enzymes. Based on the knowledge gained from ultrastructure investigations, he suggests that the formulated mixtures of various cellulases will perform much better to break down the recalcitrance of biomass structure.

More than 30 faculty, professionals, graduate students, and oversea students, participated Dr. Ding’s presentation; after that, a discussion session was further arranged for all institute personals. With this academic exchange, it is noteworthy that the understanding of biomass structures in Nano-scale would potentially open a new window for us to draw an effective strategy/technology to overcome the biomass recalcitrance. During a broad-spectrum topic discussion, Dr. Ding also supplied some constructive suggestions to our graduate and oversea students regarding their dissertation research.

Shi-You Ding is a senior and leading scientist in this field and currently works at NREL, US Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. His research was mainly focused on cellulosic biomass and its bioconversion technologies. Dr. Ding has ever worked at a couple of professional institutes, such as Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University, Weizmann Institute of Science / Tel Aviv University, Israel and National Renewable Energy Laboratory after accomplishing his Ph.D. degree majored in Plant Molecular Evolution from Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1994. Over the past decade, he has made many outstanding contributions to the academic community in the area of biomass and bioenergy. Dr. Ding has served as a member on the editorial board of the Biotechnology for Biofuels and on the advisory board for DOE and USDA funding. In addition, he also serves as a referee for a couple of well-known SCI-indexed journals in a very broad areas, such as Science, Cellulose, Carbohydrate Research, Biofuels, Bioresource Technology, Applied Biochemistry and Biotechnology, etc. Dr. Ding has authored or co-authored with his colleagues for more than 60 peer-reviewed journal papers, as well as 10 professional book chapters, including Science, PNAS, J. Mol. Bio, Plant Physiol., etc. Dr. Ding currently serves as PI and leading scientist for more than 10 research projects/grants.