Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-14-2019

Department

Department of Chemical Engineering

Abstract

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. Moench) offers substantial potential as a feedstock for the production of sugar-derived biofuels and biochemical products from cell wall polysaccharides (i. e., cellulose and hemicelluloses) and water-extractable sugars (i.e., glucose, fructose, sucrose, and starch). A number of preprocessing schemes can be envisioned that involve processes such as sugar extraction, pretreatment, and densification that could be employed in decentralized, regional-scale biomass processing depots. In this work, an energy sorghum exhibiting a combination of high biomass productivity and high sugar accumulation was evaluated for its potential for integration into several potential biomass preprocessing schemes. This included counter-current extraction of water-soluble sugars followed by mild NaOH or liquid hot water pretreatment of the extracted bagasse. A novel processing scheme was investigated that could integrate with current diffuser-type extraction systems for sugar extraction. In this approach, mild NaOH pretreatment (i.e., <90°C) was performed as a counter-current extraction to yield both an extracted, pretreated bagasse and a high-concentration mixed sugar stream. Following hydrolysis of the bagasse, the combined hydrolysates derived from cellulosic sugars and extractable sugars were demonstrated to be fermentable to high ethanol titers (>8%) at high metabolic yields without detoxification using a Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain metabolically engineered and evolved to ferment xylose.

Publisher's Statement

© 2019 Williams, Ong, Mullet and Hodge. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Publication Title

Frontiers in Energy Research

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Version

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