 Hello I'm Nathan Moser from Purdue University. I'm one of the co-authors of this upcoming paper in biotechnology and bioengineering. On behalf of my co-authors and I, I'd like to give you a short introduction to our exciting work. This is Mei Jun Zeng. She's the first author of this paper. And it was one of the products of her work toward her PhD with us at the Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering. Or as we call it, LORI. One of the research topics we work on at LORI is understanding how to efficiently deconstruct plant cell walls to release the sugars from cellulose and hemicellulose there. We can then convert these sugars after their release to biofuels and other renewable bioproducts. There's a lot of plant cell walls, or plant biomass, left over after food grain is harvested from crops like corn. This leaves a lot of biomass that could be used for biofuel production. One of my co-authors, Michael Lattish, can show us what biomass from corn looks like in the field. The corn stock there is one year of corn for corn stock, and as you can see there's lots of stock biomass which is available for other types of conversion. Thanks, Mike. We are interested in testing whether different parts of a corn plant process differently when we use pretreatment and enzymes to break down the cellulose and hemicellulose and release the sugars. In the work described in our paper, we collected corn biomass and separated it into major types of tissues, leaves and stock. And then we further separated the stock into rind, the hard outer shell of the stock, and the pith, the spongy inner tissue inside the stock. Mike, show us how a stem is made up of both rind and pith. Rind, the outer part of the corn stock, as I cut it apart with the leaf, reveals the pith. We took photographs and SEM images of the various tissue fractions, and we followed changes in these structures during processing by pretreatment and enzyme hydrolysis. We also determined the chemical composition of each biomass tissue fraction during the processing. Initially, the composition of the various tissue types were very similar. However, we discovered that the yield of sugars that you could obtain from each tissue type was significantly different. These results suggest that understanding how cell walls are assembled by the plant differently in each type of tissue may give clues as to why plant biomass is so recalcitrant or difficult to bioprocess into sugars for making biofuels and other bioproducts. Our two companion papers in biotechnology and bioengineering describe far more details of this work. We hope that this short summary will encourage you to read more about bioprocessing of cellulosic biomass.