High‐Throughput Pretreatment and Hydrolysis Systems for Screening Biomass Species in Aqueous Pretreatment of Plant Biomass

Abstract

The primary barrier to low-cost biological conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to renewable fuels and chemicals is plant recalcitrance, that is to say, resistance of cell walls to deconstruction by enzymes or microbes [1,2]. However, the discovery and use of biomass species with reduced recalcitrance, when combined with optimized pretreatment processes and enzyme mixtures, could potentially improve the commercial viability of fuels and chemicals production from lignocellulosic biomass [3,4]. Unfortunately, the current understanding of biomass recalcitrance is limited, making it difficult to rationally select superior plant species without prior sugar release testing. As a result, there is a need to generate and screen a large variety of plants to identify those that exhibit both superior and sub-par sugar release. To this end, there are two central methodologies in generating and screening plants: (1) generation of mutants to see what effect targeted modifications have and (2) evaluation of natural variants to identify outliers for further characterization, in order to relate observed differences in behavior to structural features and biomass characteristics.

Creation of an ultra scale‐down bioreactor mimic for rapid development of lignocellulosic enzymatic hydrolysis processes

“…Early reports of the utilisation of microtiter plates with lignocellulosic slurries for the enzymatic hydrolysis or fermentation process stages required modification of the biomass to render it more amenable for use at very small scales . Methods have also been developed to carry out the pretreatment stage at microtiter scale, allowing integrated pretreatment and enzyme hydrolysis trials . Extensive milling of the biomass is currently required for all of these methods.…”