Lignocellulosic biomass is an attractive source of energy because it is abundant, renewable and readily available. Moreover, it avoids many of the economic and environmental problems that plague traditional energy resources. In order to make this resource viable, more efficient methods are required to break down the biopolymer into simple sugars, which can then be fermented into high density fuels or other value-added chemicals. Anaerobic fungi are among the most efficient organisms at degrading biomass and do so primarily through large protein complexes, called cellulosomes. Cellulosomes are multi-enzyme complexes composed of a large non-catalytic protein backbone, called the scaffoldin, on to which smaller catalytic enzymes can be bound via a dockerin/cohesin interaction. Previous work has shown that the cellulosome is a particularly efficient biomass degradation machine. Mechanistic models describing the hydrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass through these fungal cellulosomes are not well developed due to both their complexity and novelty. In this work we show that the fungi are able to change the composition of the cellulosome to enhance biomass hydrolysis. Furthermore, by measuring the adsorption and breakdown of a controlled cellulose substrate using both QCM and HPLC techniques we also develop coarse grained semi-mechanistic models which take into account the processive nature of the cellulosome dynamics. Models that accurately describe the hydrolysis of biomass into simple sugars are crucial to integrating the cellulosome into the consolidated bioprocessing framework.

Coarse grained model development of enzymatic lignocellulosic biomass degradation by fungal cellulosomes

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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