An international team of researchers led by Assistant Professor Yan Ning, who is from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS), has developed a new sustainable chemical approach to produce a series of amino acids from woody biomass derivatives. The work is a collaboration with Professor Wang Ye’s research group at Xiamen University, along with scientists from Kyoto University in Japan, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, National Renewable Energy Laboratory in USA and the Institut des Sciences et Ingénierie Chimiques in Switzerland.