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Wednesday, November 29, 2006

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	Date	Outlet
State researchers tout fird flu vaccine hopes	11/29/2006	Birmingham News
E M Optomechanical, Inc. obtains license to produce products based on Sandia-developed technology	11/29/2006	New Materials International
AU students design enviro-friendly roof for Haley Center	11/29/2006	Opelika-Auburn News
A grass worth getting high on: Prairie plant seen as promising fuel option	11/28/2006	KHCW-TV Houston
AU animal clinic's deposits not made	11/26/2006	Montgomery Advertiser


State researchers tout fird flu vaccine hopes 11/29/2006 Birmingham News Dave Parks		Return to Top
This story appeared on the front page of the Birmingham News, and is about AU's collaboration with a biotechnology company for avian flu research. Scientists at Auburn University and the Birmingham biotechnology company Vaxin Inc. have created an avian flu vaccine that can be rapidly produced and applied to help prevent the devastation of chicken flocks in Asia and protect the poultry industry in Alabama, authorities said Tuesday. Final testing and approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture still are pending. But the potential is so great that an official said Vaxin representatives are traveling to Asia in two weeks to discuss producing the vaccine in that region of the world, where deadly outbreaks of bird flu have become common. "We are talking about licensing the vaccine to a number of Asiatic countries right now," said Kent Van Kampen, CEO and president of Vaxin. "They're very excited about it." Van Kampen said the new vaccine - produced with Auburn poultry expertise and Vaxin genetic engineering-offers significant advantages over existing bird flu vaccines. The improvements include: Faster production. Many existing vaccines require replicating viruses in egg embryos, but the new vaccine is produced with a manufacturing process that uses tissue cultures, which cuts time and adds quantity. Quicker delivery to flocks. Existing vaccines require injections into each chicken. The new vaccine can be injected directly into eggs at a rate of hundreds of doses a minute using robotic machines that already exist for delivering a vaccine against Marek's disease. Better detection of sick birds. Existing vaccines create an immune response that is so similar to a real infection, it's hard to tell the difference between birds that have been infected and birds that have been vaccinated. The new vaccine will allow producers to make this determination, and cull flocks instead of destroying them. New science: Many traditional vaccines are made by killing or weakening a virus and injecting it to stimulate the immune system, which produces antibodies against a disease. That response provides protection against the virus and prevents illness. The new vaccine was created by inserting a gene from an avian flu virus strain into a harmless, non-replicating virus that causes colds in humans. The approach also stimulates an immune response. As bird flu viruses constantly mutate, new vaccines can be designed in a lab and be ready within a few months. Dr. Haroldo Toro, a doctor of veterinary medicine at Auburn, said testing has shown this new type of bird flu vaccine works well when properly targeted. Key research on the vaccine will appear in an upcoming issue of the scientific journal Vaccine. "The protection is extremely good," Toro said. "We have proven the principle, which is the major step in leading to commercially produced vaccine that could be vital to the poultry industry." Bird flu has devastated poultry flocks in Asia in recent years, and occasionally killed humans who have come in contact with infected chickens, ducks and turkeys. U.S. health officials are monitoring chicken flocks and migratory birds that might bring a highly pathogenic form of the disease, tagged H5N1, into this country. The existing policy for dealing with a serious outbreak in the poultry industry would be quarantine and destruction of infected flocks. Quick vaccination around a quarantined area could help contain an outbreak, Toro said. The United States also could produce vaccines for different strains of bird flu as they crop up around the world, and have them in reserve in case of an outbreak in America, Toro said. All this is of vital economic interest to Alabama, a state that produces 27 million broilers a week. Toro's research was funded through a USDA program. It also involved the Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Ga.
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E M Optomechanical, Inc. obtains license to produce products based on Sandia-developed technology 11/29/2006 New Materials International		Return to Top
AU is mentioned in this story about devolopment of microscopy technology. E M Optomechanical, Inc. of Albuquerque recently obtained a license from Sandia National Laboratories to produce products based on a Labs-developed technology, a new configuration for interference microscopy. The need for these types of tools capable of characterizing the fabrication and performance of very small devices came about as a result of the recent growth in micro-electro-mechanical systems. Sandia is a National Nuclear Security Administration laboratory. The technology was developed by Sandia researchers Mike Sinclair, Maarten de Boer, and Alex Corwin. Sinclair says Sandia licensed this technology to Tom Swann, president of EMOM, to commercialize the product for several reasons. "His technical specialty is the design and fabrication of optomechanical instruments, and he is local, which would facilitate the tech transfer," Sinclair says. In addition, Swann, as president of Optomec, Inc., successfully transferred another Sandia technology known as laser engineered net shaping. EMOM now holds a license from Sandia and is producing products based on the technology. EMOM developed its first long-working-distance interference microscope, based on the licensed Sandia technology in collaboration with Auburn University. Known as OPTOPro model 622A 3D MEMS Profiler, this first-generation product is intended primarily for use by microsystems researchers for making real-time dynamic measurements of the micro and nano-scale motions of microsystems devices. Its key feature is that it allows for long-distance functions without any sacrifice in measurement resolution. This permits capabilities not possible with other techniques, such as space for probes, that are needed to attach to microsystem devices and viewing through portholes into vacuum chambers. W. Robert Ashurst, assistant professor of chemical engineering at Auburn University's Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, whose research interests include MEMS systems design, fabrication and reliability, says that having OPTOPro will "allow me to cut a year off my research project schedule by providing the measurement data that I need." The interference microscope developed by EMOM is controlled by MEMScript software, also developed by Sandia researchers and licensed to EMOM. The software acquires and analyzes collected data. "This software has several unique features, such as the ability to control microsystem devices, which by nature have moving parts, and making real time measurements of performance," Corwin says. The software was used with the EMOM-built 3-D MEMS profiler to run a test on a microsystems device on loan from Sandia. This device had previously been characterized and documented by the Labs. "This benchmarking was very significant in that it demonstrated that the technical aspects of the technology had been successfully transferred," says de Boer. "Successful technology transfer efforts like this are a real win-win," says Paul Smith, Sandia"s licensing executive responsible for the agreement with EMOM. "In this situation, Sandia will realize a reduction in the resources needed to maintain this technology internally while also helping to create jobs and make important laboratory equipment available to the research community.”
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AU students design enviro-friendly roof for Haley Center 11/29/2006 Opelika-Auburn News Donathan Prater		Return to Top
They've literally hit the roof at Auburn University. However, this time it's not because anyone has lost his or her cool. Actually this kind of hitting the roof will environmentally cool things off a bit. The Haley Center's new Green Roof officially opens today, but the idea is one that took root early last year, according to Lindy Biggs, associate history professor and director of the Auburn Sustainability Initiative. The 20-by-30 foot section of the Haley Center's new Green Roof is made up of what Biggs calls "green grids," 2-by-2 foot sections that are about 4 inches deep of plants that are either native grasses and wildflowers to Alabama. The green grids are designed to retain moisture and thus do not require watering, according to Biggs, who oversaw the design of the Green Roof by about 14 AU students from various academic disciplines ranging from architecture to political science. "We purposely selected plants native to our climate that would have maximum sustainability," said Valerie Grupp, 23, an AU senior political science student who worked on the Haley Center green roof project. Doing something that will have an enduring positive effect on the atmosphere is something Grupp says is "cool." "I've watched students doing double takes as they walk to and from their classes on campus," Biggs said. Aside from being aesthetically pleasing, the green roof concept has some concrete environmental benefits. The green roof plants make use of carbon dioxide, and because they will absorb a significant amount of water, will reduce the amount of pollutants found in water that might make its way into drainage and sewer systems. The plants on Haley Center's green roof were raised by the students in April of last year in one the greenhouses on campus. Because the Haley Center's green roof is organized on an already existing roof, Biggs and the students working on the project had to their homework to make sure that the existing roof could safely withstand the weight of a green roof. The end result is one Biggs describes as a "win-win situation." In addition to better controlling pollutants in water runoff, the green roof will provide both heating and cooling benefits in reduced costs to maintain the building’s overall temperature. Most asphalt-based shingles used on roofs can make that roof reach an excess of 100 degrees on a hot day. Green roofs reduce that overall roof temperature by roughly 20 degrees and help a building retain heat better during winter months, Biggs said. The Haley Center green roof is virtually self-maintaining but has small walking areas between its green grids that allow for occasional upkeep such as removing any tree seedlings as necessary. And while the Haley Center's green roof may be a new development on the AU campus, the green roof concept isn’t. Larger cities such as Chicago and Atlanta have city halls with green roofs in place. The entire process of moving the green grids from a campus greenhouse to the Haley Center, where maintenance workers help put them in place, took about six to eight hours, Biggs said. What Grupp and her colleagues learned from their work on the Green Roof Project is a fresh approach to scholarship that will stick with them long after they’ve graduated. "With most class projects you simply write a paper that only you and your professor will read," Grupp said. "This is something hopefully everyone on campus will see." The Haley Center Green Roof Project is part of the Auburn Sustainability Initiative.
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A grass worth getting high on: Prairie plant seen as promising fuel option 11/28/2006 KHCW-TV Houston Bob Secter, Tribune staff reporter		Return to Top
This story on biofuel research at AU was also broadcast on WXMI-TV Grand Rapids (MI), WTIC-TV Connecticut and Fox 59 Indianappolis. CHILLICOTHE, Iowa -- If there were such a thing as a Comeback Plant of the Year award--maybe Comeback of the Century--a top contender would have to be switch grass, a dominant part of the tallgrass prairie that once blanketed much of North America. That vast sea of grasses, so thick and high that pioneers said it could swallow a rider on horseback, all but disappeared as sodbusters ripped it away to make room for lush and productive cropland. What was an obstacle to progress 150 years ago suddenly is getting a fresh, hard look as a major source of fuel. Our energy-starved nation is scrambling to come up with alternatives to limited supplies of expensive oil and natural gas, and there's a growing buzz about switch grass even though most Americans would need a botanical guide to identify it. Agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland Co., the world's largest producer of ethanol made from corn, this month unveiled plans to ramp up research into switch grass as another source to make ethanol and other biofuels for cars, homes and industry. In Washington, the Democrats soon to take over as heads of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees have put development of switch grass as a fuel source high on their priority list. This is a "natural evolution of an industry that could be massive," said Patricia Woertz, chief executive of Decatur, Ill.-based ADM. Also known as tall panic grass, switch grass doesn't look much like the grasses that cover today's lawns. It is a lanky plant, with stems up to 8 or 9 feet high and a root system just as deep, topped with lacy seed-bearing panicles. It grows in thick, jungle-like tangles. It also is especially good at storing energy from the sun. "A living solar battery" is what Canadian switch-grass researcher Roger Samson calls it. The U.S. Agriculture Department calls switch grass "perhaps our most valuable native grass." Oak Ridge National Laboratory has identified it as the model plant species for fuel, better than corn, which is all the rage now as the prime ingredient of ethanol. President Bush highlighted the energy potential of switch grass in his State of the Union address this year. So, like a once-treasured toy rediscovered after years in the attic, switch grass is now the focus of talk about its revival--this time as a cash crop--on tens of millions of acres in the Midwest, South and Great Plains. "This could very well be the future," said Stephen Gardner, one of dozens of southeastern Iowa farmers who for years have supplied switch grass for an electric generating experiment in Chillicothe that has shown encouraging results. The notion of converting vegetation into fuel may seem odd in a nation that runs on oil, gas and coal. But fossil fuels themselves are the detritus of ancient plants, buried in the earth for millions of years. They are also a finite resource, while fuel crops can be grown again and again. "Nature figured out long ago how to store chemical energy in plants," explained Robert Brown, director of the office of biorenewable programs at Iowa State University. University of Illinois research Energy can be squeezed from most any plant, and there are a lot of them under study these days as potential fuel sources. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is leading the way in research on giant miscanthus, a grass native to Asia. It can grow to 13 feet with bamboo-like stems ripe for burning. The trick today is to target the plants that can be most efficiently grown and tapped for fuel. For now, the renewable fuel of choice in the U.S. is corn-based ethanol. It is essentially alcohol made from the starches in grain. Humans have been fermenting and drinking it since prehistoric times. Corn is abundant, and it has a clout-heavy lobby of farmers and agribusiness promoting it for ethanol, which is largely blended with gasoline. But corn has limitations as a raw material for fuel. Divert a lot of corn to ethanol production and food prices are bound to rise. Corn also is a resource hog, requiring good soil and lots of water, fertilizer and herbicide, heightening environmental concerns. One prominent researcher contends it takes more fossil energy to grow and transform corn starch into ethanol than the new fuel can yield, suggesting the process is a waste. Other experts disagree, but if there is an energy benefit to making ethanol this way, it is not huge. The hope for switch grass is that it may bypass a lot of those problems while providing more bang for the energy buck in an ecologically friendly and low-maintenance way. The explanation hearkens back to the prairies of old. Near-treeless vistas of undulating grass once stretched from the Gulf of Mexico up into Canada, providing a feasting ground for birds and other wildlife and packing the soils with nutrients. The grasses once covered 60 percent of what is now Illinois, which calls itself the Prairie State. Ironically, the fertile soil of the prairie also was its undoing. The farmers who eventually chopped it away liked to boast that the prairie topsoil was so deep and rich that it could grease the axles of their wagons. There were lots of different grasses in the Midwest prairie, but switch grass was one of the three predominant varieties. It didn't need much water, it adapted to a wide range of latitudes and soils, and it sucked in a lot of carbon dioxide from the air as fuel to grow on. Prairie fires burned so hot that they would create their own cyclones, a testament to the energy that the grasses stored away. Those are some of the traits that are kindling interest in switch grass as the nation scrambles to grow its way into energy self-sufficiency. David Bransby, a grasslands expert at Auburn University in Alabama, suggests a few more. And it grows prodigiously Bransby, who has studied switch grass for 20 years, says the plant grows prodigiously, yielding huge per-acre amounts of what the energy industry calls biomass--a term for living material that can be turned into fuel. Switch grass requires no herbicides and little fertilizer, it can take hold on poor-quality land not suitable for most crops, and it is a perennial, meaning it doesn't have to be replanted like corn after each harvest. Stands of good-quality switch grass can last 10 years or more. Switch grass also has ecological benefits, Bransby said. Its deep roots bind soil and block erosion. They also pump a lot of carbon into the ground, essentially recycling carbon-based greenhouse gases emitted when the plant is burned as fuel. "If we really put our minds to it, we can use this to help replace the oil we import from the Middle East very easily in the next 20 years," Bransby said. Unlike with corn, a cost-effective process to convert switch grass and other fibrous plant material into ethanol hasn't been perfected, though researchers say they're close. ADM's Woertz said biofuel producers right now are in a "chicken and egg" situation as they explore the potential of switch grass. "How do you build massive facilities when you haven't grown the stuff yet, and then how do you grow the stuff if you haven't anywhere to process it?" she asked. Some experts argue that switch grass would be an even better option as an ingredient for fuels other than ethanol, and the technology to make them exists now. Samson, who runs a non-profit agricultural research institute in Quebec, said switch grass already is being used to make a low-quality natural gas substitute suitable for heating farm structures and small industrial buildings. Such biogas systems are in wide use in Germany and China, he said. Switch grass also can be easily chopped and pressed into fuel pellets for burning in special furnaces to heat homes, Samson said. The slow-burning pellets heat for a price far less than natural gas, quickly paying for the cost of new heating equipment, he said. "We think we're heading toward an agrarian industrial revolution," Samson predicted. In Iowa, Gardner and more than 100 other growers have supplied switch grass for years to a federally sanctioned experiment that burns the grass alongside coal in a power plant in tiny Chillicothe, 80 miles southeast of Des Moines. Preliminary results indicate that switch grass burns almost as hot as the coal, and its presence in the fuel mix reduces sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide emissions. The Iowa farmers reaped their switch grass from stands they had planted as part of the federal conservation reserve program, which pays farmers to take erosion-prone, low-quality cropland out of production. Around the country, there are 36 million acres enrolled in the program, an area that if stitched together would cover every square inch of Illinois. Some already is planted in switch grass to help with erosion control. In the prairies of old, nature mixed in switch grass with other plant varieties that kept each other in check. That wouldn't be the case if it is reintroduced as a fuel crop across wide stretches of the nation, and the prospect is troubling to some experts in invasive species. Writing recently in the journal Science, a team of researchers led by S. Raghu of the Illinois Natural History Survey warned that wholesale plantings of switch grass, miscanthus or other grasses grown for fuel could have an ecological downside. The grasses are attracting interest as biofuel crops because they grow rapidly, need little water and appear resistant to most pests and diseases. But those are also traits that help invasive species wreak havoc on ecosystems and agriculture. The U.S. spends more than $100 billion annually trying to beat back the ravages of invasive species such as kudzu, so Raghu and his colleagues urged caution as the pressure to develop new crops for fuel intensifies. "We're not saying every one of these is a nightmare waiting to happen, but we've made mistakes in past," he said. "There's no such thing as a free lunch." ---------- bsecter@tribune.com - - - Switch grass facts - Switch grass was one of the dominant plant species of the American tallgrass prairie. - The perennial's Latin name--panicum virgatum-- explains why it's called tall panic grass. - Switch grass can grow 9 feet high, produces seeds the size of a grain of pepper, resists drought and flourishes in poor-quality soil. - Switch grass test plots at Auburn University in Alabama have produced 1,150 gallons of ethanol per acre annually.
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AU animal clinic's deposits not made 11/26/2006 Montgomery Advertiser		Return to Top
Similar briefs were carried by Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, Decatur Daily, Gadsden Times, Southwest Florida Herald-Tribune, WPMI-TV, WSFA-TV, WALA-TV and WRBL-TV. AUBURN -- More than $80,000 in customer payments at Auburn University's Large Animal Clinic were never deposited in a bank, a state audit found. An audit released Friday by the Examiners of Public Accounts cited the clinic for not complying with university accounting policies. Auditors found that between 2001 and 2004 receipts were written for $80,322 in customer payments, but were not included in deposits to the bank or collection reports. Dr. Tim Boosinger, dean of Auburn's College of Veterinary Medicine, said in a written response to the examiners the employee who handled the payments had been dismissed and procedures had been changed. The employee was not named.
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