Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello!
It is that time of the year again and I am working on my ideas for science fair. I have been very much interested in ethanol production project, but I am afraid it is a very well used science fair experiment. I would like to have an innovative project. I am looking for plant materials that have not been experimented with as an alternative means of fuel production. Is there a website that I can go to to find out what plants have been experimented with? How can I make my project stands out from all the others? I would apprecite your advice and information. Thank you so much.

sciencefairlover3 wrote:Hello!
It is that time of the year again and I am working on my ideas for science fair. I have been very much interested in ethanol production project, but I am afraid it is a very well used science fair experiment. I would like to have an innovative project. I am looking for plant materials that have not been experimented with as an alternative means of fuel production. Is there a website that I can go to to find out what plants have been experimented with? How can I make my project stands out from all the others? I would apprecite your advice and information. Thank you so much.

Hi sciencefairlover3,

First of all, in order to create an innovative project, I believe that a starting point for you can begin with improving and/or adding onto other aspects of a previous completed science project. Since you wanted to pursue a project related to ethanol production in addition to alternate means of fuel production, I recommend you to visit this site: http://www.juliantrubin.com/fairproject ... _fuel.html, which can offer you some insight.

If you are the ultimate overachiever, I recommend you to read actual scientific journals. There are plenty of websites you can visit, such as science direct, science daily, pubmed, etc. I believe that reading actual scientific literature helps you in developing an idea, especially when the researchers specify what additional things would be needed to be investigated on, and their future works. However, I must have to warn you that these scientific journals are not purely high school level and that it might take time to fully dissect it.

I hope this helps.
Good luck.

Thank you for your advice! I have been reading quite few articles on pubmed about bio-fuel production. One thing that really came across again and again that we are in need of finding a new source for producing bio-fuel. I was wondering if anyone knows what should be the amount of startch in a plant in order to predict that it will be a good source of ethanol production? I am thinking of trying to look for new plants/plant materials that woudl be suitable for ethanol production. What should I concentrate upon starch or sugar content? Thank you for reading my messages.
Rebekah.

Hi,

I think this is a very important question that you have hit upon in terms of energy production today. I doubt there is an answer for any of the questions that you are asking; that being said, hopefully you can begin to search for potential answers.

Starch content is highly variable from plant to plant, and I'm not sure it can be described by itself as a good indicator of ethanol production. One possibility would be to turn that into a project in and of itself! By that, I mean you could attempt to build a bioinformatics project that seeks to predict what plants would be good sources of ethanol production by pooling together data on starch content, sugar content, rate of growth, photosynthetic flux, etc. I think that would be something novel and would give you predictive power which you could in turn validate using a plant predicted by your project.

Thank you very much. I am trying to locate a paper that would explain the exact steps of converting corn into ethanol with all the chemical reactions. I really having trouble with it. Do you think you can help me with it. Thank you so much in advance.

Hi,

There are several approaches that I like to use when searching for more technical papers.

1) Wikipedia is a good resource for starting searches (but not for writing papers). Try 'corn ethanol' or 'cellulosic ethanol' on wikipedia, and if any paragraphs look promising, dig into the cites for those paragraphs, and those will usually be more technical.

2) Google scholar is a fantastic resource for papers, esp from peer reviewed journals. Though sometimes you may/may not have access to all of the journals, try and access them with your school's subscription.

3) Various other search engines (Scopus, ScienceDirect, etc). There are lots of databases full of scientific papers.

On top of engines, think about details that you are interested which may help reduce the number of non-relevant articles and speed up the search process.

PLEASE HELP!
Thank you for reading my post. I am working in the lab and I have some questions that I would like to clarify please. I am working on corn starch test analysis using the destarching method. I had to perform the calculations to dertermine how much enzymes I need to add. The formula I used is (Load)kg x ( M corn)g x 1/1.1 = microliters of enzymes needed to add the the solution. The scintist used 0.1 kg for the load. My question is where did he come up with this number and how did the final unit measure ended up in micro liters. My base was 10 grams and my solids were 3% . So the total of liquids added were 9.7 mL. We added 9.6 mL of the buffer and 0.1 ml of enzymes 1st time, and 0.1 mL enzymes 2nd time. Why did we choose to experiment with 10 grams . Where did 3% came from? Is it a standarn in ethanol nature experiments? Thank you so much for helping me out.

Hi,

I'm not entirely familiar with that equation, and with the information you presented, I have no idea where those numbers are coming from, sorry. Do you have a link to the actual equation? Based on your numbers (.1 kg load, 10 g corn, 100 uL enzyme), the amount of enzyme doesn't seem to work out properly... Is there any more information you can provide?