FARE in a France-NZ cooperation report

The report summarises various research projects to celebrate the scientific cooperation between Aotearoa New Zealand and France, as well as the contributions the Dumont d’Urville scheme has made to science in both nations. The FAST! network (France Aotearoa Science Technology !nnovation) coordinated the production of this publication. The articles published in this book reflect the diversity of many scientific disciplines grouped in three sections: Physics, Chemistry & Engineering Sciences; Earth Sciences and Ecology; Biology, Food & Health Sciences.

The article “Nanoscale interactions during lignocellulosic biomass deconstruction” (p. 34) presents a collaboration between FARE (Dr Brigitte Chabbert and Dr Gabriel Paës) and SCION (Dr Lloyd Donaldon) aimed to enhance the fundamental understanding of woody biomass recalcitrance in two different substrates, wood from French poplar and New Zealand pine.

For this, we studied the accessibility of pretreated biomass using fluorescent chemicals of different sizes similar to the size of enzyme molecules, that we could detect by fluorescence microscopy. We were able to measure the penetration of these chemical probes into the cell walls and hence compare the porosity of pretreated substrates with untreated wood controls. By measuring changes in fluorescence due to interaction between the probes and the cell wall we could determine changes at the molecular scale, much smaller than is directly visible in images.

This collaboration lead to the publication of 4 articles.

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Contact: Dr Gabriel Paës, gabriel.paes@inrae.fr