Through three restricted-access doors in the basement of the Agriculture Sciences and Industries building and in a quarantined room, there is a lab filled with squirming larvae, pupae and beetles that could be an alternative fuel solution.
Kelli Hoover, associate professor of entomology, is the principal investigator studying the Asian Longhorned Beetle and the microbes in its gut that could be used in the production of biofuels.
The beetles, which have long antennae, white specks on their black shells and grow to about 1 to 1.5 inches in length, are stored in the quarantined lab and studied by Hoover and her team. Because the larvae have a tendency to eat each other, the beetles are kept in small, separate containers, except for beetles put together for mating purposes.
The beetles can attack maple, elm, willow, poplar and horse chestnut trees, but unlike most insects, they attack the trees when they are living, not dead, Hoover said. These beetles attack and live in the middle of trees that are still healthy.
A material called lignin is what makes living trees hard, Scott Geib (graduate-entomology) said. Lignin is a plastic-like material that coats the cellulose in trees.
"Many insects can break up cellulose, but not lignin. This one can," Hoover said.
The beetles break up the lignin in trees, leaving the carbohydrate cellulose, which is made up of simple sugars called glucose, Geib said. The glucose can be broken down into smaller pieces, which can then be fermented into ethanol.
"Right now, we're getting ethanol from corn," he said. "Corn doesn't produce the amount of ethanol needed to sustain us."
Geib said it is likely that the microbes in the guts of the beetles are breaking up the lignin, not the beetles themselves.
He added that now they are working on isolating and sequencing the genes in the beetles' guts that are performing this action because the Department of Energy is now looking more toward cellulose for biofuels.
"The potential there has so much more energy than corn," he said.
Asian Longhorned Beetles are not yet found in this area naturally. Hoover said they were first discovered in New York in 1996, then in Chicago in 1998, adding that they first came to the United States inside packing crates shipped in from China.
With all the tracking and studying of the beetles, Hoover said that though the microbes can be used in biofuels, it is certain "you're never going to be able to put beetles in your gas tank."
Maya Nehme (graduate-entomology) is working on studying the pheromones produced by Asian Longhorned Beetles. Pheromones are chemicals secreted by insects that allow beetles to find each other.
Nehme said female pheromones are avoided by females and attract males, and male pheromones attract females. By studying the pheromones, she said they can set traps to be able to monitor where the beetles are showing up.
