Industrial Biotechnology

Background: Biodiesel, monoalkyl esters of long-chain fatty acids attached to short-chain alcohols derived from triacylglycerols (TAGs), can be produced from renewable biomass sources. There has been interest in producing TAGs from oleaginous microorganisms. As published recently (J Biotechnol...

The current “state-of-art” dilute acid pretreatment to produce bio-ethanol from corn stover requires severe conditions to overcome biomass recalcitrance, which, in turn, offers 70~80% xylose monomer yield and 5~7% furfural yield. However, high acid loadings and high reaction temperatures harm the...

Mineral acids have been used effectively for the pretreatment of cellulosic biomass to improve sugar recovery and promote its conversion to ethanol; however, substantial capital investment is required to enable separation of the acid, and corrosion-resistant materials are necessary. Disposal and...

Production of biodiesel by esterification or transesterification of long-chain fatty acids is a well known process, but the fuel product has characteristics making it not fully compatible with petroleum diesel engines. A better option is to convert fatty acid molecules to hydrocarbons by removing...

Much of the process complexity and high capital costs associate with cellulosic ethanol (dilute acid hydrolysis as a pretreatment and enzymatic saccharification of cellulose) results from side products such as furfural, acetate, and soluble lignin compounds that inhibit the biocatalysts. Inhibitor...

Alkaline hydrogen peroxide (AHP) pretreatment is exceptionally well-suited to grasses, yielding high digestibilities at low enzyme loadings, while generating relatively few fermentation innhibitors. For AHP pretreatment, the question of how structural and chemical compositional changes within the...

The conversion of C5-C6 sugars into 2-furfural (FA) and 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) have been considered as key intermediate step in the production of transportation fuels and chemicals from ligno-cellulosic biomass. Typically, the process involves the dehydration reaction of the sugars catalyze...

Some processes aimed to biofuels production, use lignocellulosic wastes as feedstocks for fermentative conversion. If this is the case, pretreatment is required to make these resources fully digestible. Among a wide range of pretreatment options, this study focuses and compares oxidative-alkaline...

Depleting oil reserves have encouraged the development of technologies to harness the natural resources to sustain the energy needs. Renewable lignocellulosic biomasses have been focus of many studies but advances in the purification and recovering of the products from the product medium has been...

In the future, it is anticipated that multi-product biorefineries will be used to convert lignocellulosic biomass to fuels and chemicals, in which, it may be possible to use membrane-based separations to recover fuels and various products and to improve energy efficiency. To biochemically convert...