What is it about?
Second generation bioethanol obtained from native perennial grasses offers a promising alternative for biofuel production, avoiding land use competition for crops production. Spartina argentinensis is a native perennial C4 grass with high photosynthetic rates, well adapted to halo-hydromorphic soils, though its forage quality (palatability and digestibility) for livestock is quite low due to its high lignin content. Hence, cattle raisers burn these grasslands frequently in order to stimulate the emergence of new leaves with higher digestibility for cattle feeding. Lignin is the main barrier to overcome in order to efficiently hydrolyze the cellulose for bioethanol production. In this work, we evaluate different pretreatments (phosphoric acid, ligninolytic enzymes and fungal supernatants) aimed to remove lignin and improving cellulose hydrolysis efficiency.
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Why is it important?
Results show that pretreatment with Pycnoporus sanguineus supernatant improves fermentable carbohydrates availability, compared with a conventional chemical pretreatment, and that 56.84% of cellulose can be hydrolyzed using this pretreatment.
Perspectives
As a conclusion of this work, we show that S. argentinensis, an extensive rangeland grass with little value as pasture may be considered an interesting feedstock for second generation bioethanol. Ligninolysis with a fungal supernatant allowed to reach near 60% of glucose release for fermentation after a short (2 days) pretreatment. Further research is needed to optimize the saccharification process and transfer these results to other similar feedstocks.
Alvaro Larran
Universidad Nacional de Rosario
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Evaluation of biological pretreatments to increase the efficiency of the saccharification process using Spartina argentinensis as a biomass resource, Bioresource Technology, October 2015, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.biortech.2015.06.150.
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