Email Article | MONTANAN FALL 2009 

The Ideas Market

UM research brings money, jobs, innovation to state

By JACOB BAYNHAM | Photos By Todd Goodrich

At the end of a recent work week, University of Montana researcher Frank Rosenzweig is in Missoula’s Kettlehouse Brewing Co., leaning against a shelf of 50-pound sacks of caramel malt on the humming fringe of a crowd clinking glasses, slapping backs, and unwinding for the weekend. He’s a lanky man with a drooping moustache, and in his hand he holds a pint of Double Haul IPA.

As an evolutionary biologist, he understands that his 16 ounces of refreshment is the happy metabolic consequence of one self-serving organism just trying to get by and multiply: yeast.

“A very great biologist, Jacques Monod, once said, ‘The dream of every cell is to become two,’” he explains in his leisured Tennessee drawl. “And that, in fact, sums up life on the planet Earth. The dream of every yeast cell is to become two yeast cells.”

Rosenzweig specializes in yeast. Nothing novel there, he says. Mankind has been specializing in yeast for about 10,000 years.

“We domesticated yeast about the same time we domesticated wheat, so we’ve basically been interested in drinking as long as we’ve been interested in a reliable food source,” he says. “But we were only taking advantage of what [yeasts] do on their own.”

Yeasts’ alcoholic waste product, ethanol, is the reason cultures from the Neolithic to now have used the fungi to ferment mixtures of grain, water, and hops. Ethanol also is the reason Rosenzweig reels in hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money from federal agencies and private corporations. He’s researching its role as an alternative fuel source.

Yeast has given much of itself already (think wine, cheese, and sourdough pancakes), but if Rosenzweig has his way, the microorganism also will relieve us of our dependence on fossil fuels. With the help of a top-secret “genetic trick” (patent pending), he and his colleagues are using some of the same breeding and selection techniques that gave us Angus cattle, durum wheat, and Braeburn apples to create a highly efficient “super yeast” that can boost ethanol production.

Most yeast can only function at moderate temperatures (30 to 32 degrees Celsius) and alcohol concentrations. Yeasts generate heat as they ferment sugar, and those increased temperatures, along with the ethanol they produce, can inhibit and even kill them. These metabolic problems complicate yeasts’ ability to cheaply and efficiently transform the 6-carbon sugars of corn and sugarcane into ethanol.

But Rosenzweig’s hybrid yeast can withstand temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius and alcohol concentrations of 17 to 18 percent. He’s also working to develop yeast that can metabolize more recalcitrant 5-carbon sugars, such as those in plant stalks and other biomass. This yeast could efficiently turn seasonal agricultural waste (such as barley and wheat stalks in Montana) into fuel.

Rosenzweig envisions a future where bio-refineries using such yeast dot the country, especially in agricultural states. “I view bioethanol as a critical stepping-stone technology toward a green energy future,” he says.

The Research Economy

Rosenzweig’s quest for a “super yeast” is just one example of the research conducted at UM. The University, known for its liberal arts education, is quickly gaining recognition for cutting-edge science. The scale and variety of research at UM has grown exponentially during the last twenty years.

The equipment, personnel, and space to conduct research projects cost a lot of money—far beyond what could ever be garnered from student tuition and state appropriations. Rosenzweig’s yeast lab, for example, employs four to six people at any given time, most of whom are paid a salary equal to Missoula’s median family income. His lab is just one of about 1,000 ongoing UM research projects, which employ 640 non-faculty personnel.

In fiscal year 2008, UM collected a record $62.2 million in grants. (An additional $2 million of research support came from the UM Foundation.) Most of the grant money came from federal government agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Energy, and others. The jobs created by these grants form a pivotal part of the local and state economies, says UM Vice President for Research and Development Daniel Dwyer.

“All those folks pay state and federal taxes,” he says. “They buy homes. They buy automobiles. They go out to restaurants. And so it’s an important chunk of money that’s coming into the state.”

Beyond jobs, university discoveries also have generated massive economic growth in this country, Dwyer says. For everything from semiconductors to computers to Gatorade, we have university research to thank. (The latter was invented by a University of Florida researcher in 1965 and brings millions of dollars in annual royalties at that university to this day.)

“America’s university research system is the strongest in the world and has been responsible for the remarkable growth of the economy of the United States since World War II,” Dwyer says. “The private sector is wholly and totally dependent on university-based research to produce new products and new business opportunities.”

But how does a university researcher go from a quiet epiphany at the breakfast table to implementing a multimillion-dollar grant from Washington, D.C.? It’s a months-long process of grant writing that starts at a computer, and ends—if successful—with the resources to tackle science’s unanswered questions.

“You write a grant because you want to succeed,” says Andrij Holian, professor of biomedical and pharmaceutical science and director of the Center for Environmental Health Sciences at UM. “It’s competition, just like running a track meet or [playing] a soccer match. You do what it takes to be successful with it, and that’s putting in a lot of time.”

Holian would know. He was UM’s top grant earner in 2008, when he collected $3 million to finance his research on chronic inflammation and bring new infrastructure to UM. He will likely earn even more in 2009. A good grant earner, he says, stays current with national trends, networks with potential collaborators in different disciplines, and adapts quickly to changes in science. Those scientists who can’t adapt suffer the same fate as any other organism, he says: They get left behind.

Holian has used grants to pay his salary for all of his nine years at UM, and he’s currently writing yet another proposal. It’s for a $1.5 million, three-year grant made available by President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill. The stimulus money has university scientists around the country submitting proposals as fast as they can write them. Competition is especially fierce, but Holian is in his element.

The preparatory stages of planning, experimentation, data gathering, and hypothesis development can take six months before Holian even begins writing the body of the twenty-five-page proposal. After colleagues review the completed product to find holes, he rewrites it. When the proposal finally reaches the funding agency, an initial review takes four months. If he’s successful, he says, it will be December before he receives the money from a grant he applied for in February.

Space-Age Science

Ric Hauer of UM’s Flathead Lake Biological Station has just been through all of that. He recently landed a $6 million, three-year grant to study water resources in conjunction with Kentucky through the National Science Foundation’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

EPSCoR was founded in the late 1970s to help smaller, poorer states stay competitive in scientific research. Montana was one of the original five states to receive funding. Today twenty-five states comprise the program.

Hauer’s grant will fund an innovative cyber infrastructure project that could radically change the way field research is conducted. It involves placing permanent data sensors in Flathead Lake and surrounding waterways that will stream information back to the lab via wireless Internet. The sensors will collect data twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Think of it as the space age of field research.

“It is literally taking water resources and bringing it into a truly modern realm that would not have even been possible five years ago,” he says.

Those sensors will transmit volumes of data so large, however, that the major challenge is managing them. Cisco Systems, a large Internet router company, will partner in the project as part of its own research and development in the transfer of field data to laboratories. To help present the information in a practical way, Hauer has turned to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, which specializes in high-end 3-D visualization modeling.

Hauer chose Kentucky as a partner state because it is the home of the largest reservoir east of the Mississippi River—Kentucky Lake, which hosts a biological station similar to that at Flathead’s Yellow Bay. Flathead Lake is the largest natural lake west of the Mississippi. Both states will place sensors in their bodies of water and share their data.

“This is a cyber infrastructure grant, and therefore it shouldn’t matter, physically, where you’re located,” Hauer says. “What’s important is what you’re doing.”

The information will be valuable on several levels, he says. Big bodies of water are one of the best places to observe long-term trends in climate change. Hauer also imagines some of the data being posted on a Web site so fishermen can check on the latest lake conditions before they make a trip. Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks also could use the information to help manage Flathead Lake.

But it’s impossible to tell how many people and agencies will find applications for the data. “It’s sort of like predicting who would possibly want to use the Internet,” Hauer says.

Wherever the data goes, scientists will keenly observe the first example of permanently deployed sensors conducting continual field research. Though the same approach may eventually be used by researchers of all disciplines, Hauer is pleased that the technology will be the first used for Montana’s water resources.

“What could possibly be more important than water in Montana to agriculture, industry, municipalities, and recreational opportunities?” Hauer asks. “You can’t get anything more basic to life and the quality of life than water.”

Bridging The Communication Gap

Behind the scenes and paving the way for all UM research is the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs.

“This office is an on-ramp to help the faculty members do their research,” says Judy Fredenberg, interim director of the ORSP. “There are indeed hoops that have to be hopped through and Ts to cross and Is to dot. The ORSP helps the principal investigators do what needs to be done so that they can focus on their research.”

Seventeen staff members are packed into the ORSP’s cramped office space. They serve as liaisons between the researchers and the funding agencies, helping them iron out the fine details of the grants’ conditions and ensuring they don’t run afoul of any federal or state regulations.

It’s a full-time job for all of them. “We don’t just make this up,” Fredenberg says. “There are a lot of federal regulations that have to be followed.”

Fredenberg is a Montana native. Her computer screen saver rotates images of elk and grizzlies. She’s proud of the campus research she helps facilitate. She points out Jerry Bromenshenk’s project to train honeybees to sniff out land mines. (“Who woulda thought?”) And Brent Ruby’s work to improve the performance of wildland firefighters, the findings of which are applied to U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. (“I think that’s huge.”)

But growing up in rural Montana as she did, Fredenberg also knows plenty of people who work hard for their living and are uneasy about universities spending their tax dollars on research that can seem trivial. She recognizes this as a major communication gap between the University and the state’s taxpayers.

“My dad was a rancher east of East Helena,” she says. “And I swear, if somebody from the institution would have come to him at the end of the day with a six-pack of beer and a PowerPoint presentation and sat down at our table and said, ‘I want to show you what’s going on,’ that would have made quite an impression.”

Fredenberg thinks students are good advocates for the University when they return to their hometowns and explain the opportunities they have here. But she says the faculty researchers themselves are the best equipped to lead the discussion.

“They have the fire in the belly,” she says, “and that can only be contagious.”

A Tragedy At Tree Line

Diana Six has pulled in four grants totaling $1 million in the past nine months. The money arrived none too soon. Six researches mountain pine beetles—the species that is rapidly chewing its way through major swaths of Western forests—and she says the major funding agencies in Washington often don’t approve a grant until the problem is critical.

“We know a lot about beetles when they’re at epidemic phase, because that’s when people will give you money to look at them,” she says. “What we really need to understand is what happens before they get to the epidemic.”

Six is unusual in that she researches not only the pine beetles, but also the fungi that act as their nutritional supplements. In a classic symbiotic relationship, the beetles rely on these fungi to turn nutrient-poor wood into a sustainable diet. The fungi, in turn, are happy for the place to stay.

The devastation pine beetles wreak on lodgepole forests is readily apparent in the West. Although the Forest Service and the public are concerned about this, Six sees the beetles like she sees fire—as a natural, native component of a lodgepole forest. In that way, she focuses her research not on stopping the beetles, but on predicting where they will move next.

“Once you get an outbreak going, there’s nothing you can do,” she says. “The conditions are there to support the beetles. The beetles are in big numbers, and the trees are stressed, typically by drought. There’s nothing you can do to stop that.”

The real tragedy, in Six’s eyes, is unfolding at the tree line with the slow demise of the whitebark pine. Once upon a time, any pine beetles that ever made it up to that subalpine ecosystem couldn’t survive the winter. Now temperatures are warmer, and beetles the size of bloated grains of rice are strengthening their hold on a very delicate and important tree.

“They’re developing outbreaks so rapidly I can’t even keep study sites going,” Six says. “They work through an area in three years, from a few red trees to 100 percent mortality.”

There have been outbreaks of beetles in the past, during periods of high temperatures, such as in the 1930s and 1970s. This time it’s different. “This isn’t a pulse of heat, this is chronic. It’s going to continue, and so the beetles are pretty much up there to stay,” she says.

The whitebark pine is a keystone species to the subalpine ecosystem. It helps anchor the snowpack. It employs Clark’s nutcrackers to spread its seed, feeding the birds in the process. Grizzly bears eat hidden caches of the cones to fatten up for the winter. Cone scarcity will drive the bears to lower elevations, closer to people. When the beetles start killing trees, the nutcrackers will move elsewhere, setting into effect a disastrous chain of events. “After a cycle like that, that’s probably the end of those trees, which also is the end of our entire subalpine ecosystem in the West,” Six says.

Six is in the process of writing another proposal. It’s for a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to collaborate with several African universities to study beetle symbiosis. If she’s successful, it will mean more people working in her lab, more money for equipment, and eventually more answers to quandaries that have befuddled forest scientists for decades.

Six looks at her watch. It’s almost time for her lab assistants to start their shifts. She’s watched plenty of undergraduates grow smitten with research over the years, and has seen plenty of eureka moments as they stumbled upon something valuable. A fleeting wistful look crosses her face.

“Everybody hears about the scientists getting all of the money,” she says, “but we don’t actually get to do much of the fun stuff. We’re writing grant proposals all the time.”

About the Author JACOB BAYNHAM graduated from the UM School of Journalism in 2007. He spent the following year freelancing in Asia—from Hong Kong to Afghanistan—publishing his stories and photos in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Toronto Star, the San Antonio Express-News, and Newsweek.

Email Article | MONTANAN FALL 2009 

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