Baskin Wins Two New Grants


Biology professor Tobias Baskin has received two new grant awards. He received a $510,000 grant from U.S. Department of Energy (Office of Basic Energy Sciences) for a project entitled "Cellulose and the Control of Growth Anisotropy". This award is a competitive renewal for an on-going project that attempts to understand how the mechanical properties of the cell wall are established by a plant and how these properties influence the fundamental process of growth. In addition, Dr. Baskin has won a new, three-year, $480,000 National Science Foundation award for a project titled "The nano-mechanics of cellulose synthesis". Baskin is Co-PI on the project, along with Lori Golner of the UMass Physics Department. The goal of the project is to use both high resolution imaging of living cells and biochemical analysis of extracts to deepen our understanding of how cellulose, perhaps the most abundant polymer on Earth, is synthesized.