Various agricultural residues, such as corn fiber, corn stover, wheat straw, rice straw, and sugarcane bagasse, contain about 20-40% hemicellulose, the second most abundant polysaccharide in nature. The conversion of hemicellulose to fuels and chemicals is problematic. In this paper, various pretreatment options as well as enzymatic saccharification of lignocellulosic biomass to fermentable sugars is reviewed. Our research dealing with the pretreatment and enzymatic saccharification of corn fiber and development of novel and improved enzymes such as endo-xylanase, b-xylosidase, and a-L-arabinofuranosidase for hemicellulose bioconversion is described. The barriers, progress, and prospects of developing an environmentally benign bioprocess for large-scale conversion of hemicellulose to fuel ethanol, xylitol, 2,3-butanediol, and other valueadded fermentation products are highlighted.

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Programmers have traditionally used locks to synchronize concurrent access to shared data. Lock-based synchronization, however, has well-known pitfalls: using locks for fine-grain synchronization and composing code that already uses locks are both difficult and prone to deadlock. Transactional memory provides an alternate concurrency control mechanism that avoids these pitfalls and significantly eases concurrent programming. Transactional memory language constructs have recently been proposed as extensions to existing languages or included in new concurrent language specifications, opening the door for new compiler optimizations that target the overheads of transactional memory. This paper presents compiler and runtime optimizations for transactional memory language constructs. We present a highperformance software transactional memory system (STM) integrated into a managed runtime environment. Our system efficiently implements nested transactions that support both composition of transactions and partial roll back. Our JIT compiler is the first to optimize the overheads of STM, and we show novel techniques for enabling JIT optimizations on STM operations. We measure the performance of our optimizations on a 16-way SMP running multi-threaded transactional workloads. Our results show that these techniques enable transactional memory's performance to compete with that of well-tuned synchronization.

In these studies, butanol (acetone butanol ethanol or ABE) was produced from wheat straw hydrolysate (WSH) in batch cultures using Clostridium beijerinckii P260. In control fermentation 48.9 g L(-1) glucose (initial sugar 62.0 g L(-1)) was used to produce 20.1 g L(-1) ABE with a productivity and yield of 0.28 g L(-1 )h(-1) and 0.41, respectively. In a similar experiment where WSH (60.2 g L(-1) total sugars obtained from hydrolysis of 86 g L(-1) wheat straw) was used, the culture produced 25.0 g L(-1) ABE with a productivity and yield of 0.60 g L(-1 )h(-1) and 0.42, respectively. These results are superior to the control experiment and productivity was improved by 214%. When WSH was supplemented with 35 g L(-1) glucose, a reactor productivity was improved to 0.63 g L(-1 )h(-1) with a yield of 0.42. In this case, ABE concentration in the broth was 28.2 g L(-1). When WSH was supplemented with 60 g L(-1) glucose, the resultant medium containing 128.3 g L(-1) sugars was successfully fermented (due to product removal) to produce 47.6 g L(-1) ABE, and the culture utilized all the sugars (glucose, xylose, arabinose, galactose, and mannose). These results demonstrate that C. beijerinckii P260 has excellent capacity to convert biomass derived sugars to solvents and can produce over 28 g L(-1) (in one case 41.7 g L(-1) from glucose) ABE from WSH. Medium containing 250 g L(-1) glucose resulted in no growth and no ABE production. Mixtures containing WSH + 140 g L(-1) glucose (total sugar approximately 200 g L(-1)) showed poor growth and poor ABE production.