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Surfactants find wide commercial use as foaming agents, emulsifiers, and dispersants. Currently, surfactants are produced from petroleum, or from seed oils such as palm or coconut oil. Due to concerns with CO(2) emissions and the need to protect rainforests, there is a growing necessity to manufacture these chemicals using sustainable resources In this report, we describe the engineering of a native nonribosomal peptide synthetase pathway (i.e., surfactin synthetase), to generate a Bacillus strain that synthesizes a highly water-soluble acyl amino acid surfactant, rather than the water insoluble lipopeptide surfactin. This novel product has a lower CMC and higher water solubility than myristoyl glutamate, a commercial surfactant. This surfactant is produced by fermentation of cellulosic carbohydrate as feedstock. This method of surfactant production provides an approach to sustainable manufacturing of new surfactants.

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Context Vernonia amygdalina Del. (VA; Asteraceae or Compositae) is a small tree growing throughout tropical Africa. It is widely used for food and medicinal purposes by local people. It was reported that it had several qualities, including anticancer activity. Objective A sesquiterpene lactone, vernodalinol, was isolated from VA leaves. The first reported source of vernodalinol was in 2009 from a different plant, only 1H NMR spectrum and no detailed structural analysis was carried out. No whole spectroscopic data were provided. Materials and methods VA dried leaves were extracted with 85% ethanol followed by further separation into four fractions by liquid–liquid extraction technique using various solvents: hexane, chloroform, and n-butanol. Vernodalinol was separated from the n-butanol fraction by column chromatography. The biological activity of vernodalinol was evaluated in estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) human breast carcinoma cells (MCF-7) in vitro. Results Results indicated that vernodalinol (25 and 50 μg/mL) inhibited breast cancerous cell growth (DNA synthesis) by 34% (P < 0.025) and 40% (P < 0.025), respectively. It is reasonable to expect an LC50 of 70–75 μg/mL for vernodalinol in MCF-7 cells. Discussion and conclusion Vernodalinol structure was confirmed using a battery of spectroscopic methods, 1D and 2D NMR, high-resolution mass spectrometry (HR-MS), UV, IR, and X-ray. These results suggest that vernodalinol, although it has some biological activity, is likely to work in concert with other ingredients responsible for the anticancer activity exhibited of VA.

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BackgroundSweet sorghum is regarded as a very promising energy crop for ethanol production because it not only supplies grain and sugar, but also offers lignocellulosic resource. Cost-competitive ethanol production requires bioconversion of all carbohydrates in stalks including of both sucrose and lignocellulose hydrolyzed into fermentable sugars. However, it is still a main challenge to reduce ethanol production cost and improve feasibility of industrial application. An integration of the different operations within the whole process is a potential solution.ResultsAn integrated process combined advanced solid-state fermentation technology (ASSF) and alkaline pretreatment was presented in this work. Soluble sugars in sweet sorghum stalks were firstly converted into ethanol by ASSF using crushed stalks directly. Then, the operation combining ethanol distillation and alkaline pretreatment was performed in one distillation-reactor simultaneously. The corresponding investigation indicated that the addition of alkali did not affect the ethanol recovery. The effect of three alkalis, NaOH, KOH and Ca(OH)2 on pretreatment were investigated. The results indicated the delignification of lignocellulose by NaOH and KOH was more significant than that by Ca(OH)2, and the highest removal of xylan was caused by NaOH. Moreover, an optimized alkali loading of 10% (w/w DM) NaOH was determined. Under this favorable pretreatment condition, enzymatic hydrolysis of sweet sorghum bagasse following pretreatment was investigated. 92.0% of glucan and 53.3% of xylan conversion were obtained at enzyme loading of 10 FPU/g glucan. The fermentation of hydrolyzed slurry was performed using an engineered stain, Zymomonas mobilis TSH-01. A mass balance of the overall process was calculated, and 91.9 kg was achieved from one tonne of fresh sweet sorghum stalk.ConclusionsA low energy-consumption integrated technology for ethanol production from sweet sorghum stalks was presented in this work. Energy consumption for raw materials preparation and pretreatment were reduced or avoided in our process. Based on this technology, the recalcitrance of lignocellulose was destructed via a cost-efficient process and all sugars in sweet sorghum stalks lignocellulose were hydrolysed into fermentable sugars. Bioconversion of fermentable sugars released from sweet sorghum bagasse into different products except ethanol, such as butanol, biogas, and chemicals was feasible to operate under low energy-consumption conditions.

Lignocellulosic-biomass-derived transparent nanopaper is an emerging substrate or functional component for next-generation green optoelectronics. The fabrication of such transparent nanopaper typically needs the delignification of lignocellulose; however, delignification not only is environmentally unfriendly but also impairs the nanopaper properties such as water stability and UV-shielding capacity. In this study, we present a green and facile lignin modification method instead of delignification to fabricate transparent nanopaper from agro-industrial waste with the combined intriguing properties of lignin and cellulose. Because lignin modification selectively removes chromophores without affecting the bulk lignocellulosic structures, the as-prepared lignocellulose nanopaper (LNP) achieved a comparable optical transmittance (∼90%) but superior UV-blocking ability and haze (∼46%) compared with previously reported cellulose (or delignified) nanopaper. The well-preserved lignin structures endowed the transparent LNP with a low surface energy and a small mesoporous size and volume. In addition to a high thermal stability, the transparent LNP exhibited excellent water stability, evidenced by an up to 103° initial water contact angle, a low equilibrium water absorption (<60 wt %), and a high wet mechanical strength (nearly 40% tensile strength and 92% toughness retained in the wet state). Furthermore, we fabricated a GaAs solar cell with the transparent LNP as an advanced light-management layer that leads to significantly improved power conversion efficiency, even under damp conditions. This work sheds light on the conversion of agro-industrial waste to nanopaper with desirable performances for optoelectronics and brings us a step closer toward the scalable production and application of LNP.

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