Because biomass recalcitrance is considered as the main hurdle to low cost conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to fuels, overcoming recalcitrance is essential to economically feasible and environmentally sustainable biomass conversion. Hemicellulose and lignin are both considered as contributing to biomass recalcitrance in terms of the intricate carbohydrate-lignin network surrounding the cellulose microfibrils and restricting access by enzymes. Dilute acid pretreatment has shown excellent promise in removing hemicellulose with high yields while base pretreatment is capable of removing lignin. However, both have proved to be effective in increasing cellulose digestibility in pretreated biomass by enzymes, even though their application leads to different compositions of pretreated material.  Because this outcome can reveal different effects in the following step, enzymatic hydrolysis of biomass, this research studied the effect of pretreatment on enzymatic hydrolysis by comparing sugar release yields from pretreated materials with different hemicellulose and lignin contents obtained from the two pretreatment technologies. To achieve this goal, a high throughput pretreatment and co-hydrolysis system was extended to low pH operation and applied to collect large amounts of data from various combinations of dilute acid and base pretreatment conditions and enzyme loadings. The results showed that substrate with the hemicellulose removal or lignin removal can give similar performances in enzymatic hydrolysis.

Application of a high throughput system to investigate the effects of hemicellulose and lignin removal on enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulosic biomass

241st National Meeting (2011)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.