Much of the carbon in the world is found in plants as cellulose, long chains of molecules that hold up the stems of flowers and the trunks of trees. You pulp cellulose to make paper, cellophane, and rayon. Because cellulose is made from sugar, and sugar can be made into alcohol, someday we'll be driving corn-cellulose-fuelled cars.

Using the nuclear reactor at the ILL in Grenoble, France, M. Wada and colleagues recently studied how the common pre-treatment of cellulose with ammonia effected its atomic structure. They were able to follow the transformation process of cellulose from its natural state to another that can more easily be refined into products. They were able to pinpoint which oxygen atoms of cellulose were binding to which hydrogen atoms of ammonia, a level of detail that can only be had using neutron crystallography. This should guide chemists to tweak the ammonia treatment to improve the process of making all sort of products.

M. Wada et al. Cellulose (2011) 18:191–206 doi:10.1007/s10570-010-9488-5

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From Retraction Watch:

Mislabeled bottle leads to Phys Rev B retraction