Carver Trust Awards Grants to Iowa State University
May 18, 2008
For More Information Contact:
Srinivas Aluru, Electrical and Computer Engineering, 515-294-3539
Olga Zabotina, Biochemistry, Biophysics & Molecular Biology, 515.294.6125
Dave Gieseke, ISU Foundation, 515.294.7263, dgieseke@foundation.iastate.edu
AMES, IOWA - Iowa State University has received a pair of grants from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust, based in Muscatine, Iowa. One grant will assist in the development of infrastructure to install a new supercomputer on campus. The second grant will be used in the study of plant cell wall composition and analyze the impact of changes in cell wall composition and structure in plants.
The Carver Trust will partner with Iowa State in the installation of a recently acquired $1.12 million Sun Infiniband cluster, acquired with National Science Foundation funding to support research projects in materials informatics, power systems, and systems biology. The $158,596 grant will provide site preparation work necessary to install and operate the system.
“Investments in High Performance Computing will have long-term campus-wide impact by enabling leading-edge interdisciplinary research, supporting the mission of other centers and institutes on campus, attracting early-career faculty, and training graduate and undergraduate students,” said Srinivas Aluru, the Stanley Chair in Interdisciplinary Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and lead investigator of the National Science Foundation project. “High-end computing is vital to research at the forefront of virtually every field of science and engineering and will specifically support Iowa State’s strategic thrusts in biological, materials and information sciences.”
Aluru plans to use leftover capacity of the new system to facilitate a number of other important research projects and train students. The infrastructure development aided by the Carver Foundation will continue to be of value in expanding current systems or acquiring new ones later.
Olga Zabotina, assistant professor of biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology, has been awarded $299,533 to study plant cell walls using post-synthetic modifications of polysaccharides by expression of microbial glycosyl hydrolases as a new tool.
Zabotina says that metabolism of plant cell wall components is poorly understood and its organization of cell walls as a system is essentially unknown.
“Our understanding of formation and modifications of cell walls and their adjustments to environmental conditions is fundamental to the successful creation of plants with desired cell wall compositions and their efficient utilization,” she said.
Zabotina’s research will contribute to developing a new approach for cell wall research and increase the knowledge about the impact of polysaccharide interaction and modification on cell wall organization. The research should also advance knowledge about potentially useful microbial enzymes that can be used in industrial applications for biomass pretreatment.
Plant cell walls provide the biomass that can be converted to ethanol. They also provide other valuable contributions including food and fiber production and pharmaceutical applications.
“We want to learn how a plant can survive, develop resistance to diseases and to in stress environments,” Zabotina said. “Our hope is to develop a broad collection of transgenic plants to provide tools to further investigate the limits of plant adaptive flexibility and to estimate the extent to which plant cell walls can be modified without damaging the plants ability to survive.”
The Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust is a philanthropic foundation in Iowa with assets of more than $300 million and annual grant distributions of over $16 million. It was created through the will of Roy J. Carver, a Muscatine industrialist and philanthropist, who died in 1981.The Carver Trust has been a long-time supporter of Iowa State and is one of the university’s leading donors with a total giving of $24 million in gifts and grants.
This grant is part of Campaign Iowa State: With Pride and Purpose, the university’s $800 million fundraising effort. More than $665 million in gifts and future commitments for facilities and student, faculty and programmatic support have been made to Campaign Iowa State.
